Either forgot, or didn’t know, Macs require activation.
Just reset it. Then booted into recovery, formatted it, and rebooted to reinstall, and it had to activate again.
Might take 3 hours to reinstall as well.
The good news is, Apple can make anybody’s Mac useless.
The other good news is, I don’t plan on keeping the Mac mini. Only 8 GB of RAM, and macOS, doesn’t work very well.
Easier to use a Linux computer with only 8 GB of RAM.