Lua isn't my primary programming language now, but it was for a while. My personal experience on the library ecosystem was:

It's definitely smaller than many languages, and this is something to consider before selecting Lua for a project. But, on the positive side: With some 'other' languages I might find 5 or 10 libraries all doing more or less the same thing, many of them bloated and over-engineered. But with Lua I would often find just one library available, and it would be small and clean enough that I could easily read through its source code and know exactly how it worked.

Another nice thing about Lua when run on LuaJIT: extremely high CPU performance for a scripting language.

In summary: A better choice than it might appear at first, but with trade-offs which need serious consideration.

Yeah, you can usually write a TCO based algorithm differently without recursion though it's often more messy of an implementation... In practice, with JS, I find that if I know I'm going to wind up more/less than 3-4 calls deep I'll optimize or not to avoid the stack overflow.

Also worth noting that some features in JS may rely on application/environment support and may raise errors that you cannot catch in JS code. This is often fun to discover and painful to try to work around.