Right, yes. In some sense it's not sexpr as usual either, the evaluation strategy gives it a rather different feel than one might be used to from other parens syntaxed languages.

'macro can be used to control evaluation, https://software-lab.de/doc/refM.html#macro , but there is no compilation in Picolisp, hence no compile time macros.

Don't see the problem with that. How is it different from using strings without quotation marks as global symbols?