These are exactly the features that make Julia appealing to me, so I’d have to disagree. Einstein once said “make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler”. The Julia language is actually quite elegant in my opinion, and lives up to this standard by Einstein quite well. (that’s an opinion, of course).
The self-reflection and metaprogramming in Julia is actually very elegant. It takes some time reading the documentation and experimenting with examples to really learn all the features, but the self-reflection features of the Julia language actually help with that and make things easier by allowing you to inspect program statements abstract syntax tree, which is an amazing concept to me.
Those are the features that make me choose Julia over anything else. But hey, if you are actually quite happy with Matlab’s version of “simplicity”, then there’s nothing wrong with preferring that. Nobody is requiring you to use Julia’s metaprogramming features in your own code, but others find those features very useful and are drawn to Julia to use those features and they should not be discouraged from using it.