Sure. And then imagine that you have to take over someone else's 100,000 LoC written with their own, unique, macros, some of which may invoke other macros, and interact with them in surprising ways, depending on what's passed into them. Now you have to be able to keep in your head what all those macros do (including to each other) while you're trying to read those 100,000 LoC.

At that point, you may not find the macros to be so much of an improvement on the boilerplate...