Yeah, Lua certainly has it quirks. However binding to JS is a huge endeavor. For instance that v8 crate doesn't easily expose a way to call Rust from JS which is trivial in Lua.
Also the JS runtime is huge and the build system is complex. You can run Lua in ~400kb or less and LuaJIT tends to walk over any other jitted interpreted runtime.
While the performance definitely doesn't compare to LuaJIT, Duktape (http://duktape.org/) could be a good target for Rust bindings - it's fairly small and available as a single-header/implementation library.
Also the JS runtime is huge and the build system is complex. You can run Lua in ~400kb or less and LuaJIT tends to walk over any other jitted interpreted runtime.