In T165935#7268637, @jberkel wrote:

If Lua on MediaWiki can't be upgraded to 5.2 or later (T178146 is stalled, with "re-evaluation in 2024"), maybe just the GC changes could be backported to 5.1, to have at least some predictable GC behaviour?

There are plenty of signs that the GC is unpredictable and that this is making this issue practically impossible to solve on en.wikt's side without dropping Lua modules altogether.

Just to note, the inline-block or inline-table 'hacks' do not work anymore, so the only way to actually solve this is to solve the core issue of <table>s causing paragraphs to be split up unless there is an outer <div> present (the resulting HTML looks as in T210695#4846093).