This is an unpopular opinion, but I wish Lua had won against python. It integrates seamlessly with C and for an interpreted language it’s super efficient. Rather than including every library under the sun in the standard lib, Lua is compact and the entire compiled binary is measured in kilobytes. You can read the Lua source code in C and comprehend a lot of it in a weekend.

Lua Rocks package manager includes basically every library you could want. Lua doesn’t even include proper object oriented programming, but is so powerful you can add support for it quite easily, and is a good learning experience for aspiring Lua programmers.

Lua is a great language, I wish it was mentioned and compared against more popular languages like Python and JavaScript.

Instead of Lua, I'd like Scheme to have become a more popular language for all those reasons you mention.

Is there any flavor of lisp that is close to luajit performances and still small?

Chez Scheme [1]. It's a R6RS Scheme, so bigger, but Chez has much better embedding support, is backed by Cisco instead of a single dev. Chez doesn't make standalone executables though, because Chez is jitted. It may be the fastest Scheme. It also includes a compiler, a profiler, a great debugger, live memory-introspection, and an enhanced REPL [2] that can dump out it's definitions and any comments into a lovely Scheme file.

[0] https://github.com/gambit/gambit

[1] https://github.com/cisco/ChezScheme

[2] https://cisco.github.io/ChezScheme/csug9.5/use.html#./use:h2