The double-edged sword of the Pico-8's constraints is that they're there to force you to keep your game's scope manageable, but you can push past them if you're willing to suffer.
When you're at max tokens, you get into this feedback loop where you write some code, try to test it, realize you're out of tokens, do an optimization, try to test it, realize you still don't have enough tokens, repeat, then once you get under the token limit you have to debug every change at once.
I code golfed probably 150 tokens (~580 total so far) in order to add axe-door particles. Probably eight individual optimizations that each need to individually be tested. It adds way more QA risk than usual to any new feature. Normally to ameliorate this sort of extra QA load you add something like a regression test system. Unfortunately that would require tokens!
Here's the payoff though:
