First thing I recommend is that you don't wind yourself up too much reaching for what sounds like a sophisticated technical understanding of "historical materialism". I honestly have to say that I don't understand what you're trying to say when you combine "predictive", "empirical", "intersubjective" and "operational" in your question. "Intersubjective" especially doesn't fit with the rest or with historical materialism in any of the bodies of thought you are referencing: that is an interest which is more commonly associated with what people would call "microhistory", with cultural history, with narrative, or with critical theory. I also don't quite understand linking selective risk or selectorate theory in here--that starts to feel simply like "social theory with comprehensive reach".

So let's try to build up a basic synthesis. "Materialism" in a general sense in history as well as philosophy is often paired with "idealism", a word that can sometimes lead people astray as we're accustomed to idealism as a synonym for optimism, altruism, hopefulness, etc. Here it simply means: do you think history is mostly driven by changes in how people think, believe, imagine, in their sense of selfhood or their conceptions of politics; or do you think historical change is mostly driven by the material world outside of the human mind, in our environments, our technologies, our systems of production, in our physical and embodied nature?

"Historical materialism" is often associated with Karl Marx's thought. I'll come back to that in a moment, but it's worth noting that if you are looking for other sources of applying materialism to history, an earlier touchstone might be the work of the Islamic historian ibn Khaldun. Khaldun's masterwork The Muqaddimah was first published in 1377 CE. While it describes some quite specific real histories, especially of North and West African societies, at its heart is a theoretical vision of history as a kind of causal loop that goes roughly like this: Sedentary societies based on agriculture and trade become progressively wealthier over time due to their ability to produce value from the particular environmental affordances in their central cores (fertile land that produces surpluses of food, control over trade routes that connect multiple environmental zones). As they grow wealthier, their ruling classes grow more decadent and despotic and less able or willing to organize their societies to defend their shared bounty. As this weakness intensifies, these societies are targeted by opportunistic pastoralist societies at their fringes who eventually invade the core, overthrow the ruling elites, step into the role of rulers, impose new discipline and reform institutions, and then the cycle of growing decadence and despotism begins again. This was a materialist conception of history: the central causal engine of historical change for Khaldun is environment and location.

As I said, Marx is often seen as the premier modern Western example of a historical materialist, so much so that "historical materialism" is often seen specifically as a description of Marxist thought. There's a lot to say about Marx's version, but in its basics, it is more sweeping and yet more specific than Khaldun. More sweeping in that Marx argues that all human societies can be understood in terms of their characteristic "modes of production", in the way that they organize human labor and human technology to produce value (food, commodities, etc.) from the material environment and more specific in the sense that Marx is focused on the social organization of production. Material conditions are not determinative or causal for Marx until and unless they are engaged by human labor--there is not a real material "human nature" that precedes and determines the social organization of labor. Everything else in human life, from our sense of self or identity to our social institutions to our expressive culture, in some sense derives from how we organize production within our material environments.

You can have materialist views of history that are non-Marxist. The economic theorist Thomas Malthus was a non-Marxist materialist who argued that human populations are determined directly and inflexibly by food supplies (which turns out to be too simple even as a characterization of complex ecologies and definitely of human societies). The historians William McNeill and J.R. McNeill are both materialist historians in various ways who are not Marxists--William McNeill argued in his book Plagues and Peoples that human societies are driven in part by a dual "parasitism"--on one hand by microbial pathogens that cause epidemics or chronic diseases and on the other hand by predatory ruling elites who exploit others without reciprocity.

Many of the historical thinkers associated with the schools of thought named by the OP are at least nominally Marxist or inspired by Marxist thought (most of the Annales school authors like Braudel and Ladurie, etc.) but not in a particularly doctrinaire or polemical way.

More recently, some historians have taken an interest in a field that has been called "big history", which seeks to broaden the materialist understanding of human history by resituating it within the physical history of the entire universe.

What the OP is calling "predictive" means different possible things in different branches of materialist historiography. For Marx-inspired materialists, it means specifically the proposition that class conflict that is a result of the organization of production will continue to drive human societies until a futureward point where the contradictions of capitalist production at a global scale produce a revolutionary reaction from the vast majority of human beings who have been transformed into proletarians who do not own or control their own labor. That's fairly abstract, so this way of thinking is sometimes focused on more specific kinds of crises or contradictions in specific systems or on particular kinds of crisis (say, for example, the environmental or material limits to growth and the view that capitalism is intrinsically unable to recognize or adapt to those limits, hence an inevitable near-future collapse of capitalist production).

Other kinds of materialist history may also view themselves as having predictive value. "Big history", for example, may look to situate the human future within larger scales of physical and material conditions and limitations and may for that reason come to some of the same conclusions as some Marxists about the consequences of a system that requires infinite growth within a material environment that places hard limits on human societies. But that could also spur some people inspired by big history to argue for the need to develop the capacity to work resources and seek energy sources outside of this planet, whereas most Marxist historians would argue that the only solution to our material limitations is to reorganize human societies at a basic level.

Here I think many types of materialist history even in their own terms may run into a problem that haunts social science more generally, which is that it is extremely hard to conceptualize and describe complex adaptive systems in their totality and yet that is necessary if you want to be predictive at any scale--a lot of prediction just tries to extrapolate existing trends forward when in fact you have to have some capacity to understand how many levels and systems of material life interact simultaneously and sometimes produce surprising or unexpected systemic outcomes that transform all of those interactions in ways that aren't just extrapolations of current trends. The Industrial Revolution is a classic example of that, and we still struggle to fully appreciate and understand it at both highly local and massively global scales.

I hope that this helps, I'm still a student but this is adjacent to my greatest area of interest:

I think it varies greatly depending on the subject. Historiography, historical disciplines, historical philosophy, etc., are very diverse and immense subjects--as you are finding out.

One complicating factor is that "history" according to its pretentious academic definition is the study of historical texts while "anthropology" "archaeology" "linguistics" and various other disciplines focus on other aspects of our past. And, while the disciplines feed off of, and feed, each other, there is an amount of nuance that separates them--at least in a purely academic sense. This considered, if we are studying historical texts of a subject then we fight against the perspective of the author. Here is an example:

The Spanish wrote a great deal about the indigenous Central Americans that they encountered. However, their records are a pretty rough overview of the society that they were observing. There is valuable information to glean from them but they are incomplete and misrepresent things that the Spanish weren't interested in understanding. In those documents there are umbrella terms assigned to diverse groups of people, proper names that are not acknowledged, exaggerations and misrepresentations of motive, and most notably they imply that there was a level of agency in the conquest, that many of the indigenous people wanted the Spanish there.

The Spanish Conquest, much like the colonization of North America, are tricky because there was an amount of cooperation among some indigenous people. However, it was on a case by case basis and no single text, or series of texts can fully summarize those complicated relationships. So, to better understand the history as it truly happened, historians have to analyze any shred of original language documentation available. In the case of the Spanish Conquest there are actually a fair amount of Nahuatl texts because the Spanish required everyone to do a bunch of paperwork. And, just by looking at those documents--both the mundane and those of more contemporary interest--we can find the discrepancies. Lockhart calls this study of original language Nahuatl texts "The New Philology" and posits that it is an interdisciplinary study heavily relying on archaeology, linguistics, and history. This discipline gained some traction in the 70's but took off in the 90's and remains a popular field of study today.

But that is only one situation. There are different situations like this for just about every historical subject. That's what makes giving you a specific answer very tough. I think it's less about finding a protocol or system that can be used universally, and more about nurturing a generation of students and historians with solid critical thinking skills. People that can compartmentalize different historical interpretations and consider them all. Often, the truth is a jumble of different sources, and our job as historians (professional, armchair, or aspiring) is to sort them out and find the most reasonable narrative.