Comment by MrJohz

But the point is that almost all of the common places where macros are used in everyday Rust could be replaced by reflection. There are exceptions like some of the ones you mention, but these are clever hacks rather than materially useful. Yes, you can write inline SQL and get it type checked, but you can also use a query builder or included strings and get the same effects but in a much less magical and brittle package.

Macros in Rust are primarily a tool to handle missing reflection capabilities, and them enabling other code as well is basically just a side effect of that.