Vimscript is a pain but these days you can use Neovim which supports Lua as a replacement. Iād recommend checking out what Neovim has to offer. ThePrimeagen has a great video on setting up Neovim as an IDE from scratch.
I mean it's a matter of preference, I personally find vimscript a lot more readable for vim configuration. Maybe not for more advanced stuff, I don't know, but how is the following:
While I wholeheartedly agree, you don't have to sprinkle Lua everywhere, you can use both. As a matter of fact, I do[0]. And when I want to enable a setting on the fly in the editor, I still use the vimscript version. But Lua is way nicer to work with the moment you do something non trivial. For example, I've never been able to make sense out of vimscript string interpolation.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w7i4amO_zaE