I feel like the keyword there was MORE sanitary.

Writing functions that assemble code into a string is definitely not the best way... you lose syntax highlighting, code completion/suggestion, refactoring, etc, in any meaningful way.

The less your meta requires you resort to strings, the better... and that folds back into my #1 point; storage class separate from the type system is the greatest complexity on meta; almost always leads to text mixins, because there's no machinery for storage classes (or attributes). Can not alias, compound, aggregate... anything.