Comment by rweichler
I guess it provides less freedom/flexibility on the dev side. You're forced to use LuaJIT, and you're forced to buy into OpenResty's coroutine paradigm where global variables act weird, and stuff like that. Also I bet it doesn't play super nice with LuaRocks.
Totally valid choice to make, but in my opinion OP is missing out. OpenResty is state of the art and has a ton of great libraries embedded in it. It's "batteries included" so to speak, and the batteries are well designed. Yichun Zhang is one of the GOATs, along with Mike Pall. And Roberto, obviously.
While everything you said there is true, it is a matter of taste for me. I prefer working with PUC Lua over LuaJIT. The speed improvement of LuaJIT doesn't matter for me, the only thing I miss from it is the FFI. I wish PUC Lua had the same FFI interface tbh.