Absolutely! (In fact, I wrote a half of the sentence suggesting this but I then I thought it might be better to keep the comment short.)
I find Base.Cartesian, with combination of @generated, is overused. Most (maybe all) usecases can be done with functional programming. I think it’d be much better because it forces the programmer to come up with more composable and easy-to-debug abstraction.
There is a similar discussion of “the metaprogramming temptation” by Steven G. Johnson in JuliaCon 2019:
Having said that, of course, sometimes it is better or necessary to use metaprogramming techniques to, e.g., workaround compiler limitations. I think @unionsplit is a good example that we have a legit need for a macro.