Honest question: why do you prefer lualatex to xetex?

You mean XeTeX for LuaLaTeX, I think.

No, the parent clearly indicates that they consider XeTeX a worse choice than LuaTeX.

My mistake, apologies!

LuaTeX is the de facto successor of pdfTeX and is basically a more maintained pdfTeX with Unicode support and Lua scripting, whereas XeTeX has its own engine. In practice, it means that LuaTeX "just works" with most documents while with XeTeX you run into all sorts of weird incompatibilities. Fancy packages that make use of Lua scripting (e.g., graphdrawing) will only work with LuaTeX.

Edit: Looks like it's not de facto anymore, and LuaTeX is now recommended for all documents and XeTeX is being recommended _against_ (https://www.texdev.net/2024/11/05/engine-news-from-the-latex...)

Thanks! I vaguely remembered getting a bit of mixed messages with regards to the two last year when I was looking into Tectonic. I just read a bit into the github issues and it seems like the Tectonic devs happened to fork Xelatex and not Lualatex. https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/issues/158#...

Anyway, what they made works perfectly for me, I luckily don't use any of the fancy graphics packages that use Lua. I use Latex a few times a year at most, and Tectonic just works for me. With my previous Lualatex workflow I had to deal with Tlmgr and that whole ant's nest, figuring out one by one which packages I was missing each recompile.

Seems like the main argument against Xetex in the article you linked is that it is unmaintainted, so it doesn't really apply to Tectonic, but it's a bit frustrating that an opportunity for ecosystem convergence potentially has been missed.