A Macro Lives in the Same Drawer as a Copy

Type qa, and what you do next is recorded into a place named a. That place is not reserved for macros. It is the same drawer Vim keeps copied text in, called a register.

In Vim, starting a recording with q puts the keys you press into that drawer as plain text. It is the very same drawer a line goes into when you copy it with a name, as in "ayy. So a macro can be pasted out: paste it and the recorded actions appear on screen as readable characters. It works the other way too, because keys you typed by hand can be copied and played back, and that is already a macro.

To Vim, an action and a sentence are the same material. What you write can run, and what you ran can be written out.