Note, your use of “meta” here is not standard usage in the programming community at large, and is therefore probably confusing to many readers (I’d avoid it in this context).

The sense you mean is a shortening of “metagame”, a term used since the early 2000s or maybe before by Starcraft I players to describe the broad trends in overall strategy and play-style evolving over time as the whole community of players adapt to each-other’s games. The term may have been used in other similar contexts before that time, but as far as I can tell that’s mainly where it was popularized.