MacOS can't be recovered; stuck on progress bar

Hi, I was hoping someone could help me figure out my issue because even the Apple Phone Support guy couldn't.

I have a very old MacBook Pro Retina 15" Mid-2012 (10,1) that stopped starting up. Nothing I tried worked so I gave up on it and used my iMac and iPad mainly.

Months later, I decided I wanted to fix this issue. So I bought a brand new SSD, switched it out, and attempted to enter recovery mode. When I tried to recover, by pressing CMD + R, I was taken straight to Internet Recovery Mode. I assume that means my Recovery Partition is damaged or doesn't exist since this is a brand new SSD. I have a very fast wifi connection and my wifi was still able to connect but just for extra safety, I plugged in an ethernet cord. I saw the spinning globe and then I was taken to an Apple Logo with a spinning loading icon. After a long time, nothing happened and my computer shut down, while it was still plugged in so I know the battery didn't die.

My next step was to create a bootable drive using my iMac. I tried this with BOTH Catalina and High Sierra. I used the instructions and terminal prompts on Apple's website to create may drive. I plugged it in, started up the MacBook, pressed OPT/ALT, saw my drive and selected it. I was plugging in to the ethernet again, but I also connected my wifi. I got the the progress bar page and eventually it reached about 85% of the way there and then it would stop. It would stay like that until my computer shut down for no reason. I would start it up and be presented with the flashing file folder with the question mark image. 

I was so confused I didn't know what to do so I tried random things. The new SSD I bought came with an enclosure so that I could take my old SSD and make it into an external SSD. Using that enclosure, I formatted it so that it was empty, put it back in my MacBook and tried all these steps again to come up with the same result. 

I also tried safe mode, resetting my PRAM/NVRAM, my SMC...everything I did resulted in the same issue. I just can't seem to get past the loading bar. Hope someone can help me out!

Ps. yes, I know I should buy a new MacBook but I'm a broke student lol