Sure that's an option, most distros continue to include every lua version back to at least 5.1; and since luaJIT stayed there a lot of the rest of the community did too.

I guess I'm not sure what advantage lua has in that regard: you could stick to an old version of any language, including node, which was called out as being hard to keep up with.

The simple interpreter seems worth a lot. The official one is under 20k lines. There are reimplementations in many other host language (Go,Rust,JS, etc). Meaning it should be possible run Lua code forever without maintaining a full legacy virtual machine OS. I am not sure I can compile Node today, let alone N years from now as compilers and platforms shift.