Have you heard of Teal (https://github.com/teal-language/tl)? It's like typescript for Lua made by Hisham. It also has the concept of declaration files so you can import (and type) existing Lua modules if needed.
Edit: Oh yes it's still like that 'When loading and running the Teal module from Lua, there is no type checking! Type checking will only happen when you run tl check or load a program with tl run.' from https://github.com/teal-language/tl/blob/master/docs/tutoria...
- https://luau-lang.org (interpreted / sandboxed)
- https://terralang.org (JIT interpreted)
- https://nelua.io (Lua -> C)
- https://typescripttolua.github.io/ (TS -> Lua)
- https://github.com/teal-language/tl (Teal -> Lua)
- https://github.com/sumneko/lua-language-server (IDE only typing)
With minimum effort you can get a lot of benefit from using Sumneko's Lua language server.
There's another one you missed in Pallene[2]. But again, it's goal was to optimize the stack sharing involved in using the C API. It also adds types though and maintains Lua idioms as much as possible.