Nitpicking: LaTeX is a bad example because it's bulit on TeX, which does have macros. :)
But I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of saying that "TeX & Emacs are somehow more powerful than Chrome because their systems use macros."
Granted, sure. People cope well with not being able to express their problems the way they want to. The existence of so much high-quality C/C++/blub software proves this fact.
But for those of us who don't want to change our thinking, tools that fundamentally extend the language are great to have in our toolbox. Maybe it's our weakness, that we feel uncomfortable when we can't express the problem the way we want. Or maybe it's our strength. I don't know.
In fact, most of it was and is written in C/C++, horror of horrors, and fewer in Pascal / Java.
The notable exceptions I can think of are Emacs (partly), Autocad (partly) and Pandoc.
So I guess there's a tradeoff, use cool languages and not contribute much of usable software, or use some so-so language and create stuff people use.