Stuck in Reboot Loop

Hoping someone more knowledgeable than me can help me out of the pickle I’ve created.

Was donated a legacy 2012 MacBook Pro 15 inch (model 10.1) that I’m trying to update to Sonoma to be able to run some ai models / play around with it.

Wiped the drive after I backed up the old users docs to offline hard drive. Interestingly this computer had an extra terabyte of memory added to it so there is both a Macintosh HD and Macintosh HD - Data drive.

Installed open core , ran the application, no issues. Crated a boot drive on US. Successfully. Ran the usb drive and successfully logged in with Sonoma.

Here’s where I missed up. I didn’t immediately turn off updates so the system went and pulled a potential Tahoe update in the background ( didn’t realize until a moment later. Danced with success , installed ollama.

Went to set up Tailscale and problems started. First of all I installed Tailscale incorrectly. Realizing that I had done something - I uninstalled Tailscale and went to restart. Upon restart, the screen was white so I tried to run the root patcher again, but I got the screen that said that there was already an install in progress. Unfortunately I also lost network connectivity so I tried using the terminal to remove the pending file but I could install the purge tool. I tried reverting the root patches thinking I could roll back given it was working temporarily but that only made problems worse. After trying approximately 10 times to remove the started install without access to WiFi I decided that I couldn’t and I would just reboot from USB

Only it won’t work. I have gotten a bunch of different combinations of errors.

But regardless of what I do (manually trying to recreate blessed file structure, unmounting and remounting disk) nothing. I can get to the usb loader, and to the next page, and to the recovery page but once I’m don’t installing Sonoma, it won’t get to login screen.

Important to note because I’m slightly afraid I really screwed this up - I noticed by checking disk utility that the drives had been renamed from Macintosh HD and Macintosh HD - Data to a whole bunch of of data extensions. Thinking it would be confusing the file system and leading to my loop- I erased both drives which reverted them to their previous names. I’m afraid I erased open core from the local disk in doing so though I originally assumed that was not held on those disks.

What on earth am I doing wrong? What else can I try? Have I just essentially bricked this laptop?

If you’ve made it this far, thank you. Also, please please help. I’ve lost my faith in my CS abilities