Well Already made reqs, just gonna post a few comments about machoke + the ladder and how people were dealing with it as a result.
From my experience on the ladder, I used machoke the whole suspect as it is what you're supposed to do. What i found is that teams were very lazily built, with minimal checks and on some occasions, no fighting resists whatsoever. Secondly, people were sacking their fighting resists very easily and then complaining later in the game that machoke was too good to play against... Derp. The teams that had genuine machoke checks with things like gourgeist or CM clefairy, it did virtually nothing the whole game and it didn't do anything and when I was facing offensive teams, machoke was pressured heavily by a variety of things like mr mime, articuno, or swanna. So it leads me to a simple conclusion about the ladder:
If you don't prepare for machoke / don't want to prepare for it - you can't complain if it steam rolls your team. It's an S rank pokemon, you have to prepare for it just like any other threat.
My thoughts leading up to the test, i think most people know but I will repeat myself so that this thread knows how I feel. I think that the offensive sets that machoke provides are very good, but only against particular playstyles. They lack longetivity throughout the game and will often be chipped away very easily. Despite having a powerful dynamic punch to break through slower cores, it doesn't beat any of its counters unless of pure confusion hax + the machoke player sits in spamming their moves hoping for the confusion. By which case, most of the time things like swanna / beheeyem / gourgeist will win this 99% of the time. Furthermore the offensive set is not what makes machoke so good. It is hard to fit on teams if it does not add to the defensive core and for that reason, the bulky rest-talk set has taken over.
The rest-talk set is extremely nice to have in the tier whereby you have virtually 0 resists to bolt-beam, or things that can really stand up to water-ice coverage. Having machoke on the team is a wonderful thing for balance team building whereby it adds a bulky pseudo resist to a multitude of threats in this tier such as regice, floatzel, rotom-f, monferno and that's just to name a few. Not only that, but it has an offensive presence as a bulky wall, which makes it even better. Adding onto this, it has its amazing coverage of dynamic punch + knock off, which are the 2 most spammable moves in the tier, with rest-talk there's a 66% chance you'll pull one of them and it's going to do something good for your team if your opponent switches out. Not to mention that machoke has the option to invest in its spdef / defense, speed, power, it can literally do anything. It is a wonderful pokemon to add to any team as a pseudo resist. However, this doesn't look at the negative effects that machoke applies to the tier.
I can admit that there is a team building strain around machoke, like there is with any S rank or top pokemon in the tier, however I always feel that people overstate how much machoke affects team building when there are a lot of counter measures that I personally use (I built over 20+ teams during pupl, not all of them were perfect and they re-used certain cores but not one of them was weak to machoke) and people are choosing to use the lesser checks. Things like grumpig / arbok are not counters and should not be treated as so, if you aren't going to add another machoke check to your team, you are going to be weak to it. And there are a variety of mons that take advantage of machoke and setup on it / heavily pressure the machoke's members team. Things like Mr. Mime, Clefairy, Duosion, Articuno, Beheeyem (big threat of late), Swanna, Arbok and even Mawile. It's not even like these pokemon are bad. And if you want to use a passive option, you have defensive mawile + psychic type core which i personally used or just slapping on a Gourgeist-Super.
I can also certainly admit that confusion is a dumb mechanic that makes machoke annoying to face, but i think it can be played around by switching out and pivoting. Yet I also know that confusion is used to get around its checks and counters to obtain free switches, i admit it's not the most ideal mechanic, but it is manageable so far and we are nitpicking at ways to improve our tier.
However i feel that the benefits that machoke adds to the tier in ways of role compacting in team building is far greater than the strain it puts on teams. I think it provides great benefits in ways of team building and it has plenty of counter-measure, however most people are not using it. Overall I will be voting for a NO BAN because I feel it adds way more than it takes away from our tier, despite confusion being gay as fuck.