[p_l]

There's a long story of macros wrapping DEFUN/DEFGENERIC/DEFMETHOD/DEFCLASS. I'll admit I even used some for shortcuts in declaring types and constraints.

But their use isn't that widespread, and in practice you can pretty quickly get used to the rare case that needs you to understand them.

I think the most complex is stuff that requires code-walkers and involved things like macros for CPS transformers of code.