Can't invoke recovery mode on Mac Mini 2018

I need to reformat the hard disk since the apple ids have corrupted the system. Apple support came to that conclusion. What Apple support didn't tell me was what to do when the various key combos to get into recovery mode don't work. The mac mini has only two USB ports and I have switched the keyboard and mouse usage on these two ports and no matter what I do (time I hold down the keys while restarting) the mini always boots into the standard OS, displaying the list of users, two of which are corrupted by the apple id system and un erasable and taking up 47 GB of space.

I have used the disk utility and as far as I can tell the recovery partition is present. APFS formatting apparently.

How can I get into recovery mode? Is there a way to do it without going through a system restart and using the keyboard? (There is nothing wrong with the keyboards.)