They load in mod dependency order (that's what optional and mandatory dependencies are for) and otherwise in alphabetical order, yes. I considered it, but deceded not to. I'll add optional dependencies if necessary. Also there's several stages, so this data-updates.lua loads after ALL data.lua files regardless of mod order (with all mods data-updates.lua files loading in the same mod order again). So optional dependency isn't actually necessary in many cases even if mod "zzxyrqse" adds capsules, as long as those are added in data.lua.