An administrator can disable many of the macros in Confluence, but some of them are used by Confluence for functionality which is not supposed to be disabled. Some examples are:

• recently updated, used on the dashboard and default space content
• page tree search, used in default space content
• network, used in the personal space sidebar
• follow, used in user hover
• profile, used in the people directory
• page tree, used in Browse > Pages, edit page.

Unless the associated functionality is disabled completely (e.g. to address CONF-16032), administrators should not be able to disable these macros.