No, they solve a complex problem.

Have a look at modern web development. Because they have no macros, they wrote a bunch of tools which "compile" different domain specific languages (DSL's) to "the real stuff". Nowadays you compile pseudo HTML, pseudo CSS and JavaScript (modern style) to HTML, CSS and JavaScript (backward compatible, a.k.a. old style JS). That's insane. On the other hand, whiteout those code-transformation tools – which are called macros if they are built into the language – all those fancy and simple web-tools would not be feasible.

Ignoring macros means to me oversimplifying programming. Which results into not solving the real (meta) problem. For a while you will get away without macros/code generation, but in the long run they are inevitable.