1) You can use interpreted version for rapid development and switch to compiled for release

2) You may like Lua as a language and want to use it for general purpose programming, not necessarily embedding into host program

I will say though that the performance aspect has to be taken with a grain of salt, "native compilation" is not a meaningful improvement if every source line translates to multiple branches or vtable lookups. From my experience plain conversion of Lua to C (assuming you faithfully follow the specification, including coroutines, metatables, etc.) produces equal or slower code with rare exceptions for numerical loops. If it wasn't all AI generated I'd maybe spend time understanding this project.