This indeed is not Algol (or rather C) heritage, but Fortran heritage, not memory offsets but indices in mathematical formulae. This is why R and Julia also have 1-based indexing.
Lately, yes, Julia and R.
Lots of systems I grew up with were 1-indexed and there's nothing wrong with it. In the context of history, C is the anomaly.
I learned the Wirth languages first (and then later did a lot of programming in MOO, a prototype OO 1-indexed scripting language). Because of that early experience I still slip up and make off by 1 errors occasionally w/ 0 indexed languages.
(Actually both Modula-2 and Ada aren't strictly 1 indexed since you can redefine the indexing range.)
It's funny how orthodoxies grow.
There are only a few languages that are purely for beginners (LOGO and BASIC?) so it's a high cost to annoy experienced programmers for something that probably isn't a big deal anyway.
Thus, 1 probably wasn't "easier", it just adhered to an existing orthodoxy that "beginners" came from at the time.
The problem is that Lua is effectively an embedded language for C.
If Lua never interacted with C, 1-based indexing would merely be a weird quirk. Because you are constantly shifting across the C/Lua barrier, 1-based indices becomes a disaster.
If anything, the only significant change is that the community is becoming more and more convinced that offset array support is a bit of a footgun and makes it easy for bugs to sneak into generic code.