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I'd avoid all of this nonsense myself. All too often it leads to Freemarker Abuse and translates into poor rendering performance.

Sure it may simplify your development of templates, but the ongoing penalties you pay from it will far exceed the cost.

Instead, look to simple templates doing simple things and, when you have complex logic to apply, use a TemplateContextContributor to inject a java instance that takes care of all of the complexity.

It is actually quite simple to do that. Just add the ftl file to the resources folder in a module, e.g.

my-module
 - bnd.bnd
 - build.gradle
 - src/main/resources/mytemplates/MyMacros.ftl
 - <other stuff, java files, ...>

Now you can include your template in other ftl files like this:

<#include "my-module_SERVLET_CONTEXT_/mytemplates/MyMacros.ftl" />

"my-module" is determined from the Bundle-Name or Bundle-SymbolicName from bnd.bnd (I don't recall which one)