They're way more oppressive champs than Yorick. Good example is Rumble. At least Yorick has to stack that tear.
Coincidentally Yorick always had the upper hand in the match-up against Rumble. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Tear sucks on him though. Chalice / Glacial Shroud + Sheen is all he needs with the sporadic mana potion(s) thrown into the mix without being reduced to a total pushover.
Rumble was broken (before he was nerfed) because they bug fixed his Q, which sent his damage way out of control
Rumble's fun to play against for me. He has clear strengths and weaknesses, something Yorick doesn't have. His ult is pretty hard to use well but when you do it's amazing. His unique resource system makes playing as and against him different to most champions in that there are very obvious times to trade with him and obvious times when to not trade with him. You can punish him for making poor decisions with his skills and overheating.
Rumble's a really well designed champion.
I get what you're saying about Rumble and I don't necessarily disagree with your assertion about
immediatedly clear strengths and weaknesses, but even during his peak Yorick's were visible to anyone who would spend just a little bit of time looking into his kit and playing him once or twice instead of fussing over the so-called insufferable ghoul spam.
- If he goes Tear into Manamune, his early and midgame is bad, full stop. Only somewhere along the way in Season 3 did the item actually become anything worth a damn, but to this day it's still a noob trap on him that's easily punished.
- Shaking off ghouls by walking into the brush was always fairly easy (laughably so nowadays) and if a Yorick likes to spam, build some resilience and stand near your minions whilst he ignorantly casts his W to dig his own grave... Provided you tell your jungler just how vulnerable he is.
- He has no fast wave clear, so push him into his tower (after warding) if he doesn't buy anything proper with the first back and go be a threat elsewhere. Force him to choose: spend more mana for minions or lose experience + gold to help his team out.
- If he's running Teleport, not only is his global pressure subpar (to put it lightly) but you have nothing to fear from him since the typical solo queue Yorick player lacks any killing power.
- Putting a point into his ultimate at level 6 has always been a blatant mistake; rarely will it actually turn around a gank if activated on himself once he got into trouble and it'll only widen the gap in terms of raw combat stats against early fighters. In a lane that's decided by early advantages. Now imagine that during his prime where Irelia, Riven and Renekton among others were frequent picks.
- Hell, his ghouls can even be exploited by sustain-heavy top laners - unless you're Vladimir, he gets spanked by Yorick - because it's essentially free health for them; Warwick, Susan, Nunu, E-maxing Cho'gath etc. always casually shrugged them off and current-day Trundle also gives no shits with appropriate runes et al thanks to his revised W. Gragas also wasn't particularly concerned due to his passive + long-range barrel.
Not to say Yorick doesn't have any strengths, but the complaints surrounding him (and Nunu top for that matter) always struck me as knee-jerk whining by those who couldn't be bothered putting
some research into how to abuse his multiple shortcomings. In
all his iterations. Even going so far as to say that mana isn't an issue for him kinda says it all, too.