I’m not sure that you’re describing the same thing, but this very experience you’re having with Lua is what drove me away from Ruby, and ultimately from all non-statically compiled PLs.
Instability in the VM, but more so in libraries, meant upgrades became projects to fix things that broke because libraries introduced regressions, API changes, and new bugs. For any non-trivial application, something would break. This was entirely unacceptable for services; entire suites would go down because of a regression in one popular library, and you get to find these things out at runtime.
Eventually, I went back to entirely statically compiled languages - I’d encountered the same usage with bytecode VM languages like Java, to a lesser degree. But with PLs like Go, once I have a binary, it’ll work until someone breaks libc. Not impossible, but that happens years or decades apart, not monthly like it did with Ruby.
Now I make do with zsh, or bash if I plan on sharing, with help from the usual ask/ser/grep crowd. If I start feeling cramped, I know my program is getting too big for scripting and switch to a reliable language. The short-term convenience is not worth the long term grief.