About blocking by reading files, does it matter when webserver loads files to be able to send them to client? Because on first load OS will usually cache the file in RAM, so it is not problem to load it twice.
So in this use-case it should not be slower to run Lua script on each request where it will check if file is redirect and then 301 or let webserver serve it.
So in this use-case it should not be slower to run Lua script on each request where it will check if file is redirect and then 301 or let webserver serve it.