It is true that even in a Lisp, unfettered use of macros can result in write-only code, so you do have to be careful about what kind of cognitive burden you are

It is true that even in a Lisp, unfettered use of macros can result in write-only code, so you do have to be careful about what kind of cognitive burden you are imposing upon people who will have to read your code. With that said, I tried to learn about metaprogramming in a number of other languages, and Lisp is the first one with a metaprogramming model that I could actually grok, because the meta-language is equivilant to the language itself. Lisp macros are more or less just plain old code that manipulates data structures. When I'm working on a lisp project, I give myself a budget of a very small number (often just 1 or 2) of magic macros that I can build for it. Other than that, I only use macros in the core library, or well-known third party libraries that other people are likely to be familiar with.