How timely! Right now I'm learning Lapis [1] by building a toy CRUD app that I plan on deploying to fly.io. Lua reminds me of Go insofar as it's a really "dumb" language. You can't get too cute and there are a few powerful abstractions that let you accomplish a lot. Coming from Python (which is an endless horizon of PEPs and build artifact standards and name mangling and kwargs and... well, you get the idea) it's kind of a breath of fresh air.
As for 1-based indexing: it makes more sense. We're all just used to 0-based because that's how C worked. If you stop and think about it early C was really just a veneer on top of assembly and since addressing an array in memory meant having a pointer to the first element that meant that it was arr[0]. We have no need for this decades later.