Right, well I can only speculate, as I don`t really talk to any of the boys from the black polar neck side of techno.
But I can give you my version of how I do it.

Generally in a lot of dark techno, particularly from the birmingham camp, there was a trend in the top end percussion.
Very wet shakers, that kinda went, shar shar shar shar but sounded very large and wide.

Geenrally, it`s shakers being used and not hats, the patterns tend to be fairly loose (groove quantised to some kind of jazz swing).

When going for this sound, I use a combination of shaker samples and white noise shaker like sounds, generally made with a percussion generator like Drumatic or something similar.
2 or maybe even 3 separate shakers layered up, but with the patterns not exactly matching, so it sounds like a bunch of people playing shakers.
If you are using a couple of white noise type shakers, use filters to tonally separate them, as pitching white noise doesn`t make any difference.

Then I use a nice stereo separation plug in, to get the whole lot nice and wide, via a bus they are all grouped to, with maybe a touch of wave shaping/fuzz or something to add just a little digital grit to the higher frequencies.

and some nice EQ to sparkle it all a bit.

Don`t compress them, as a rule compressing your top end is a bad idea.

that should do ya.
Sometimes a little bit crushing is nice too, to break the sound apart a bit.

You shouldn`t need to mess with chorus or flange too much, as it tends to round of the sound and take away some of the nice abrasiveness.

the wetness comes from the width, the mix of groove quantisation and the use of analog noise generators.