One example that I feel most devs can appreciate is the elimination of "boilerplate" code. How often in your non-macro language do you find yourself repeating the same lines of code with minute differences?

Think about JavaScript before and after destructuring was implemented. How many lines of code and mental effort are saved!

In Common Lisp this is just a macro, DESTRUCTURING-BIND (http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/m_dest...). Not a fan of the syntax? Just write a macro to modify how you use it.

Macros allow you the programmer to do similar things, but with anything you want. You don't have to wait for a language committee to agree on something, and then a third party to write a convoluted pre-processing system to 'transpile' the code to work. It's built into the language.