As for folks like Hegel, you may be interested in this post from a bit ago. No social scientist can work free from what you call "meta-historical theory." The very fact of us producing a historical study is an assertion of some philosophy of history or anthropology or economics. We must learn to recognize to which schools of historiography we subscribe and how that may affect our work. Whether you're a Hegelian idealist or Marxist materialist, it's important that you know that you are and how it can help or hinder you. A pure adherence to certain ideologies of history can be detrimental, but someone like Hegel isn't inherently considered wrong.

For the other folks you bring up, you'll be interested in this recent discussion on Jared Diamond. His work gets brought up every so often on this sub, and this particular thread resulted in some good discussion on big theories of history. You'll find that most of us are rather hostile:

I can tell you that large scale ideas are antithetical to most schools of ethnography: Marxist materialism emphasizes physical production at the individual level, Geertz's "thick description" is all about recording details, and post-modernism stresses personal narratives since objectivity is impossible.

The complexity of the historical process is such that you can't really understand the mechanisms underpinning it at the macro level because they are so contingent on a case by case basis.

Toynbee's and Spengler's ideas of neatly classifying civilizations are horribly outdated. No one groups civilizations like that any more, especially as an actual unit of analysis. The theories are embedded in antiquated ideas of race and social evolution.