I would say that that is a language developers way of looking at it. 
For most users of Elixir whether parts of the “standard syntax” like def and if are built-in syntax or macros is completely irrelevant. How I write them and how do I use them are the important bits. do ... end vs do: ... is a little more complex but I think you can happily just describe what they look like and how they equate to make most users happy and to get them right.
Again, I think most users, even those who write big complex systems, will not define their own macros even though they will be using lots of things defined by macros. In one way it is similar to the fact that using OTP you can write large extremely concurrent and parallel systems without a spawn, send or receive in sight. You should know that things are being done concurrently but you don’t need to use the explicit concurrency primitives.
