The problem isn't with writing or reading metaprogramming. It's in debugging issues in the program that the metaprogram writes. You have to then figure out what both the meta-code and the code does and how they interact to have a good understanding of the problem.

There's also some very powerful advantages to avoiding metaprogramming. Like, "grepping for the name of a token shows all instances where said token is relevant". This is an incredibly powerful tool, and you really miss it when poking around in new codebases with lots of magic.