In my experience, a proclivity to programming serious low-level code in C very much comes with an intense defensive reaction to things like "metaprogramming using the C precompiler". At least I still vividly the remember my co-workers' reaction to the C code I wrote as an intern, when I tried to be clever.
I mean.. a lot of code that's written in C isn't particularly "low level" in the sense that it's optimizing for runtime or memory in any kind of outrageous way. A lot of C is very normal/straight forward code which can benefit greatly from metaprogramming due to the lack of language-level niceties.
> I still vividly the remember my co-workers' reaction to the C code I wrote as an intern, when I tried to be clever.
That's understandable. I'm highly skeptical of clever code anyone writes, including myself.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that metaprogramming and being clever aren't mutually intertwined ideas.
Then came libdill, which created the whole "structured concurrency" movement and brought new concepts to light that are now being replicated in python, kotlin, java...