Taking a pointer-to-pointer is intentional to make it clear that the pointer will be modified. That's actually the most important difference from nn3's version IMHO.
I tried making it a plain function at one point but ran into some weirdness around using void * * with certain arguments (const buffers?). You don't want to accept plain void * because it's too easy to pass a pointer instead of a pointer to a pointer. Using a macro is (ironically) more type safe.
Maybe someone else could figure out how to do it properly, since I'd definitely prefer a function.