That's just syntactic sugar (and a bit of architecture independence) over intrinsics. You can get the same in C++ just with wrapping intrinsics in classes, and a few ifdefs.
There are a lot of good comments here already, but I can't let this pass by the main page without taking the opportunity to rail against Lua because, no, it's not underrated. It's everywhere and terrible.
This article is fairly light on detail, only mentioning a couple table footguns, but there are MANY more. (I also disagree with it being "accessible even for beginners", but I'll stick to objective things.) For starters, the size operator `#` doesn't work on map-like tables, and there's no easy way to copy part or all of a table, or to serialise one for printing.
Lua doesn't have `switch` or even `break`/`continue`. Though it added a `goto`—years after we collectively realised that's an antifeature. You can use `and`+`or` as a ternary, but you need to remember that it works differently with bools and that `nil` is falsey ofc. And `0` is truthy. Using a variable which hasn't been declared yet or is otherwise out of scope gives `nil` rather than an error. In fact most logic errors are SILENT (yay dynamic typing), and some syntax errors are raised far from the actual cause. `<const>` isn't.
Before Lua 5.3, all numbers were floats. The patterns used for `string.match` look superficially like RegEx but they are not, despite them predating Lua. The stdlib is woefully lacking, with the official documentation seeming to taunt you with examples of how several common functions could be implemented, but it's left to you to copy them into your projects.
So yeah, Lua might be small and quaint, but that's only because so much is not included "in the box", and what is included is no good.
You have named all the players. Maybe throw ShoutWiki in there, but I recently tried to create a wiki there and it wasn't working—YMMV. There's also NIWA, focused on Nintendo-related IP, but I believe that's more of a webring and doesn't manage hosting for their members.
Most of the platforms you mention are "replacements" which have "won" over a long term—Google unseated AltaVista and Yahoo!, Reddit outlived Digg and SlashDot, and microblogging like Twitter started as blogs. And of course, Fandom "replaced" other, less bad wiki farms by virtue of buying them.
But I don't personally remember any of that happening. I wasn't using Reddit when Digg was still around, just like I didn't join Facebook when MySpace was still relevant. The first time I used Yahoo! was after its search engine because Bing with a different label.
