The article shows how to implement map, but it should be a builtin

A builtin is definitely better for the efficiency alone. Vanilla chibicc needs 5GB to preprocess the example.c from map-macro, in comparison to compiling an amalgamation of itself only takes 50 MB. It of course wasn't optimized for memory use but it's a peak into how much token expansions are involved in the wizardry.

But that repo says it's effortful for the preprocessor and you can see in the code it's a recursion limited but what's in the file. If you had, maybe, a few thousand register definitions in an embedded system, that won't do it.