While I agree that metaprogramming is rife for abuse, and I'd definitely prefer if my fellow programmers used it less than they do, I'd argue that the alternative to having metaprogramming is much worse and leads to brittle black-box voodoo code.

Metaprogramming is pretty wide, ranging from primitive textual substitutions like C macros to type-aware hygienic macros ala rust, and from limited scope like C++ templates to full-on program writing like in lisp.

In C and C++ (current versions) the entire module system is built-up around the metaprogramming hack of doing #ifdef header guards. Even this is a bit error prone, but the alternative is only expressible as a compiler intrisic (#pragma once).

In languages like C, Go and early Java, the lack of generics (a type of metaprogramming) makes it impossible to write type-safe generic algorithms forcing casts to void*, interface{} and Object resp.

Implementing type checking for printf-like constructs requires compiler-intrinsics or C++17 constexpr meta-programming.

In C and C++ you must manually implement serialization and deserialization for structs and everything else that is naturally expressed and iterating over the elements of a struct. Alternatively you could use something like protobuf, which (surprise!) has compiles your protobuf file into a C++ program you can include. Using something like Rust's serde is /much/ simpler, and is only possible due to metaprogramming.