This infuriated me so much that on principle I swore off pkg-config forever.
Well, it's not the first time that the Gnome people have shown poor judgement! I bet you that a perfectly good substitute could be written in about a thousand lines of Lua, probably even less.
I'm interested in luapath because I'm looking for more robust Lua detection mechanisms for Lake, preferably as a plugin.
(Of course, when you're on Windows then you're in the world of shaky heuristics anyway since there are no standard places for libraries whatsoever)