I went through quite a few stages of grief reading Graham's On Lisp starting with "this is so awesome" to nitpicking details like "he defined everything else but he didn't define nconc" to "if we was using Clojure he wouldn't be having these problems with nconc" to "funny I can write 80%+ of his examples in Python because most of the magic is in first-class functions and macros are a performance optimization except for that last bit about continuations... and Python has async anyway!"

Notably he doesn't do any interesting tree transformations on the code because tree structures in list are just a collection of twisty nameless tuples that all look alike. If you were trying to do nontrivial transformations on code you'd be better off with an AST in a language like Java or Typescript. In the end the dragon book is On Lisp squared or cubed, that is, games people play with macros are a pale shadow of what you can do if you actually understand how compilers work.

I believe it is more superficial than it sounds: https://www.expressionsofchange.org/dont-say-homoiconic/