But there are ready-made powertools. There are even really nice "standard"-like libraries such as penlight. Depending on the environment you're using, you can have a Lua distro that already contains all the most useful libraries already baked in. That stuff is out there already for those who want it.

In my opinion, one should assemble their own. You don't need to develop everything yourself, but you can grab the libraries you know you'll need/want and craft a little baseline Lua for you. LuaRocks can do that with some clever argument passing and fiddling with the search paths. Then, you're in control again, and your powertool is definitely yours.