Help with remnant EFI partitions wasting space on my hard drives

Hello all:

I am having an issue where drives, internal and external, that I format are remaining on the disk after subsequently being formatted for re-use. These are all formerly used as EFI partitions. I cannot delete the partition remnants because they do not mount for Disk Utility to identify them. Hard Disk Manager by Paragon Software, which I use to manage my hard disk partitions and who is likely my next contact, shows that, while subsequently renamed, they are in fact EFI partitions that I have deleted. They did not, however, become reabsorbed into the remainder of the free space on the disk.

Error when deleting the partitions from Disk Utility:

Thanks,

JJW

P.S.,

The problem is best viewed from Hard Disk Manager:

I'm not sure if the EFI partition in Shared Support/macOS Base System partition is another example of the problem or whether its just the macOS EFI. I think the latter, because I don't think the macOS Base System would be written to a FAT32 volume.

The command to delete partitions do not appear for these partitions:

They look like this in Disk Utility:

They appear to be treated by macOS as hard disk volume/partition containers.

I am posting because, while others have found answers in using Disk Utility's terminal commands, for me, it results in an error code 69877: