However viewing it as Machiavellian/adversarial makes me feel like you have the wrong perspective on social skills. Fostering a culture of trust and connectedness is the key; deception is part of the game but no more than a tiny percentage of it.
The skills you're looking for aren't really political or Machiavellian. It's not scheming to stand up for oneself. As other posters said you ought not to put social skills in the same bucket as Machiavellian traits.
Now as for others, if you're trying to be in business like many on HN do, then you absolutely need to be politically savvy as the business world is filled with MBA sharks and hustlers. It's not all evil and knives in your back, but a certain level of shall we say hyperawareness of social jostling is necessary to get ahead. Business is basically politics, but your reward is just more money and not power over life and death.
I had a boss who claimed to had previously supervised both David Cutler (at DEC) and Linus Torvalds (at Transmeta) I don't know if he always was so evil (he had a life-changing injury that probably made his attitude a lot worse) but I caught him lying to me and to other workers. He used "one-on-one meetings" as a tool to gaslight people and to this day the "one-on-one" is a bad smell for me.
Other places (like where I am now) have been much better.
Office requires something closer to street smarts than true Machiavellian traits.
Often simply knowing when to watch your back is enough
Machiavelli saw these people
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Medici
as being a corrupting influence on Italy and advised any would-be prince that if they didn't really watch their back they would lose their kingdom. Machiavelli was particularly opposed to the religious idea that injustice in this world is acceptable because God will dispense justice in the next world. Machiavelli thought that if a good king was deposed then evil would win 100% of the time so the good king had to be a realist.