What are the properties of the language that they do hate, specifically?
As I've said, my own code is mostly in Lua these days, and I am enjoying working on it. It's closed-source, so I can't point you to it.
I've probably written Lua for about 15 hours in various contexts, and I've never enjoyed it.
I haven't written in it for a while though.
I replaced python with it for misc code generator and admin tasks for that reason. Instead of whatever pip is called these days and global installation conflict nonsense, I can clone a single .c from github that contains lua and all the libraries I've found useful so far.
Mostly it just gets out of your way. Compiler feedback isn't wonderful when you get something wrong but it's adequate. Some conventions are a bit weird but it's fine. Lexical closures, garbage collection and native coroutines make up for them.
I just felt Python's feature set was becoming too boated, and reading other people's code was becoming too much of a cognitive drain, because others don't tend to subset the language in the same way that I would subset it to keep complexity to a minimum.
Also, the larger feature set of Python means that code written in Python doesn't move between environments as easily. With Lua, I can rely on hobbyist implementations running on top of Java (KeraLua/Luna), .NET (NeoLua), JavaScript (fengari), or native (the original PUC-Lua), where the latter in turn has bindings to other languages (like Python). With Python there has been the same amount of appetite to do these things (Jython, IronPython, various JS-based pythons like Transcrypt, etc.) but they just never achieve actual compatibility with CPython for practical intents and purposes.