I haven't done enough PICO-8 to have enough of a sense of how I really feel about tokens. It's part of the whole constraint philosophy, and I do appreciate that you can name things a bit better because you're not totally constrained only on characters (although I do find myself using a lot of short and semi-cryptic variable names). But some of the things that take up tokens just go against a lot of how I personally feel about good code.
Like you pointed out, getting rid of objects and dumping things in the global namespace can save tokens, and sometimes a lot of tokens depending on how much you repeat. But ugggghhhhhh.