I started with LuaLoader, which seems to be stable, but it is painfully slow. Even at 115K bps, it takes a surprisingly long time to upload small source files.
I tried ESPlorer, but found it unstable in my Windows 10 / 64 environment, with the entire ESPlorer GUI becoming unresponsive. It's development didn't progress beyond version 0.2.0-rc3 in 2016.
So I've gone back to LuaLoader. It never made it past V0.91 also in 2016.
What are people here using now? Are any tools currently being developed and maintained? What do you think is "best"?
Or has Lua NodeMCU lost interest and support from the community? Are people now focusing on native C on the ESP8266 in the Arduino environment?