> Yep this is definitely a problem, but fortunately the culture/community around Elixir generally tends to frown on unnecessary macros. I heard the saying, "if it can be a normal function, it should be" many times, which pleases me.

While Elixir people usually say this, they don't at all follow it in practice because of the terrible example set by all the libraries. Phoenix is especially egregious and I can't believe the grandparent didn't bring it up.

Looking at Clojure's solution that is (as far as I can see) very popular it makes me annoyed at the relaxed attitude towards macros in Elixir and how bad it actually is:

Elixir and `Plug.Router`:

    defmodule MyRouter do
      use Plug.Router
    
      plug :match
      plug :dispatch
    
      get "/hello" do
        send_resp(conn, 200, "world")
      end
    
      forward "/users", to: UsersRouter
    
      match _ do
        send_resp(conn, 404, "oops")
      end
    end

Clojure and `reitit` (https://github.com/metosin/reitit):

    (def router
      (r/routes
        [["/hello" {:get (fn [r] {:status 200 :body "world"})}]
         ["/users" {:name :users
                    :router users-router}]
         ["*" {:get (fn [r] {:status 404 :body "oops"})}]]))

basically everything in the Elixir case is a macro and non-standard syntax whereas literally of the components of the Clojure case are just standard data types, and yet it manages to be more readable.