https://crates.io/crates/parity-wasm is an interpreter in Rust; there's some really interesting stuff happening with it in various forms. One of the most... extreme is https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/88sxah/nebulet_can_no... (There are some more production-aimed things as well.)

I think this idea has a lot of merit, overall, exactly as you say: kind of like a Lua.