My hot take is that Hegel really doesn’t have much to offer. He has one or two good ideas out of thousands of pages of nonsense and obfuscating terminology. “Only one man ever understood me, and even he didn’t understand me.”, is an actual quote by him.

Marx was influenced by him, because Hegel was the most popular philosopher in Germany and acted as a kind of philosophic leader. Everyone had to engage with his ideas, but Marx had to throw nearly everything out, since Hegel was an idealist after all.

Struggle, flux / change, contending ideas, the dialectical method, synthesis? None of these are his original ideas, they come from ancient greek philosophers, who formulated them more clearly.

There are strains of Marxism that focus on the dialectical method, and its Hegelian idealist roots, and these stand in opposition to the more scientific / empiricist-minded Marxists, who focus more on using marxism in the real world. A lot of these idealist philosophers “soar on the elevating power of thin air”, and never come back down to reality.

People would be better off studying socialism in action, and socialism in power: these are living forms of Marxism, being tested in the real world, learning from their mistakes via real-world practice.