This tracks with my experiences. Classical macro shortcut keys are great if you can spare the effort of preparing an ultimate workstation setup for them. But the majority of the workflow you want to have concentrated on a vocabulary of a few keys that you reuse a lot like "copy" or "undo". And that only needs a few keys, and moreover, it's usually pretty contextual to a specific app and not strictly about keys but the whole range of inputs - some apps need you scrubbing through timelines and tracks, others need zoom and rotate. Lots of apps have modal toolbars, but they don't all use the same shortcuts to select the pencil tool or the crop tool, so you have layers of configuration to solve to get to the point where you can even test the setup.

So devices with screen displays for shortcuts like the Stream Deck, the Xencelabs Quick Keys, or the many DIY programmable solutions are pretty indispensable because they let you trial and error ideas, and give you a context hint while also keeping the keys located in the same place - they let you ramp up to a traditional macro experience as you start getting pages of stuff you want to trigger. And this goes even more so if they are able to respond to desktop generated events and present the right context automatically.

A nice cheap alternative to the dedicated hardware is the various tools that are smartphone-based: if you're going to look away from the screen to browse, and you want to trial ideas for shortcuts, then tactility isn't so important and the rest is a matter of getting a good software experience.