Dynamic scope gives callers the ability to provide values to their callee's callees, without polluting the argument list. It's a tremendously valuable option, which is ignored by just about every language these days. Fortunately you can fake it, e.g. with Go's context.Context.

Macros help clean up the verbose mess of catch/throw or try/except or panic/defer/recover blocks and make the logic explicit rather than implicit. Without macros, you have to spell out all the boilerplate all the time. You can get part of the way there with anonymous functions, but they are also imperfect and verbose.

I think there's a lot of argument right now between folks who recognise the absolute necessity for macros and folks who don't understand it yet; so far as I can tell there's very little understanding of or apreciation for dynamic scope. This strikes me as unfortunate: while I definitely don't want it by default, it's wonderful in a lot of situations.