I dunno where you live, but maybe remote jobs are an opportunity? 8 years of java ain’t nothing to sneeze at and if your people skills are good, that’s probably always sought after.

Maybe a position as technical director or technical lead could be interesting?

Between Lua and VueJS, probably VueJS is the most likely to get you a job as a front-end developer. From VueJS to React isn’t a big step. If you don’t enjoy frontend (however you said you enjoy vuejs so…), you can look at stuff like Flutter and React Native to write smartphone apps. Every stinking business out there seems to want one of those, so if you’re interested, that’s where you can go.

As for lua, my first thought (as a web developer) is NGINX scripting. Probably LUA has way more uses (probably used for modding games too?), so just searching for LUA job openings might get you something?

Not sure what exactly you do, so a step from static typing to dynamic typing with LUA to another dynamically typed language isn’t big. Python is quite popular, but if you aren’t a data engineer or something similar, the most likely use will be backend web development with Django, Flask, or FastAPI.

In most cases though, I think you can expect a salary hit unless you pick up AWS certs (or are willing to after being hired) and move in to Site Reliability Engineering - basically devops with heavy cloud focus. Frontenders are paid less than python backenders who are paid less than java devs. Last I read C++ devs make a killing (no wonder, it’s an arcane language full of gotchas and you have to pretend segfaults are never your fault). I wouldn’t recommend it, but if you want money…