(How do historians themselves respond to one of the major questions of the 20th century in the philosophy of history, perhaps best epitomized by the perceived tension between Hegel's dialectics and Nietzsche's genealogy)?
EDIT: Instead of downvoting my question, still awaiting for responses, which I consider a rather petty and pointless thing to do (as in not contributing to anything), you can come out of the dark and raise your objections in the comments section, so that we might all learn something. Cheers!
One reason you may not have responses is because there is a very short answer, at least for many historians: history does not have a telos.
There is, of course, a much longer answer leaning on Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kojève, and so on. Some historians do believe that there is an end to history and that history is progressive - thirty years ago Francis Fukuyama wrote a paean to liberal democracy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Hegel saw Prussia as the end of history.
That philosophy of history is very important, but it's not en vogue and hasn't been since, at least, the end of the First World War. So-called Whig History, popularized by Herbert Butterfield but well-recognized before him, holds almost no academic weight despite the popular appeal of authors like Fukuyama and Pinker.
There is a parallel thread of degeneration, that things are always getting worse and we are slipping away from some imagined summit; both are interesting, but neither are popular today. Another question might ask why the discipline stepped away from grand narratives, Great Men, 'progress,' which would be interesting!
As the other person said, historians (at least within history departments) don't think in terms of teleology or grand theories of history anymore, with the possible exception of world historians (in part because they do need a way to keep their narrative under control).
That said, there are people who still treat history analytically, in terms of actors/agents and structures, discontinuities and ruptures, but they're not necessarily in history departments. Rather, it's probably more prevalent among social scientists who take history seriously, particularly because they're trying to explain causality by qualitatively isolating and examining discrete variables and factors.
For instance, there's a school of thought in comparative political science and political sociology called Historical Institutionalism, which tries to explain how and why societies might experience dramatic change. Similar to how Thomas Kuhne would talk about paradigm shifts, historical institutionalists would see societies functioning along a "path dependent" status quo before being interrupted by a "critical juncture" (say, a revolution), in which a space opens up for a menu of options, possibilities, and chance events that could radically transform the rules and institutions governing that society before becoming fixed into a new dependent path.
The interesting part for scholars then is not just seeing where the cards call, but how the cards are tossed and why they fell into the place that they did during this "critical juncture". Here, the debate revolves around how historical actors and agents are constrained. To what extent are decisions determined by existing structures, culture, and assumptions? How much agency can we attribute to outstanding individuals and chance events--in other words, how much free will is involved in shaping such events? The debate between agency and structure is not so much either/or as a spectrum of interrelated explanations.
Note that historical institutionalism is not teleological. Path dependence does not necessarily imply historical progress in a Whiggish way (though political scientists in the West almost all hope critical junctures lead to democracy), and critical junctures are by definition a space where theoretically anything can happen (subject to the amount of constraint you see depending on whether you lean structuralist or voluntarist). Also, insofar as you lean towards the agency side of the debate, it doesn't necessarily promote Great Man Theory; it just means that a person did something at the right time and the right place that had major ripple effects (e.g. Gavrilo Princip was hardly a Great Man of History himself).
That said, do note that historical institutionalism takes a very positivist ontological and epistemological view of the world: it relies a lot on observable factors like institutions and the actions of individuals. It's very useful for explaining concrete political change like revolutions and civil wars, but definitely not useful for more interpretation-heavy subfields of history like cultural or social history, nor is it necessarily self-reflexive about their assumptions about historical dynamics, discourses (either during the time or those employed by scholars now), or problems with arbitrary periodization.
[I know this is more r/asksocialscience than r/askhistorians, but I hope mods are ok with this since OP's question is more about the philosophy of history than actual history, and social scientific positivism is one way of looking at historical events]