Within Disk Utility you may need to click "View" and select "Show All Devices" so that the physical drive appears on the left pane of Disk Utility. Erase the physical drive as GUID partition and exFAT if you want to use the drive with both macOS & Windows. If you only want to use the drive with a Mac, then erase the physical drive as GUID partition and MacOS Extended (Journaled) as this will allow you to use the drive with older Macs as well. Plus I prefer MacOS Extended file system over the newer APFS file system right now since I've seen APFS become damaged where Disk Utility First Aid is unable to repair the APFS volume which necessitates erasing the drive and restoring from a backup since there are no third party utilities available to attempt repairs on the APFS volume because Apple has not yet released the necessary APFS documentation necessary.
FYI, it is always best to allow macOS to manage the external drives. Relying on third party proprietary software to manage an external drive and to use the NTFS file system usually will result in problems at some point when a macOS update/upgrade breaks the third party software and prevents you from accessing the data on the drive until someone (the third party developer, or Apple) fixes the issue. When a macOS Monterey driver earlier this year broke the third party NTFS driver, it was several months before another macOS Monterey update resolved the issue. During that time Apple told people to contact the drive's manufacturer, while the third party drive manufacturers and developer's told users to have Apple fix the issue. FYI, it is up to the third party manufacturers and developers to make sure their products work with every macOS update/upgrade. Apple will only fix the problem if Apple deems it is indeed Apple's fault. Keep in mind that Apple very rarely informs the public of any pending fixes so users are left not knowing whether Apple even knows of the problem and whether Apple is going to fix the problem.
If this WD drive is an SSD, then do not perform any multi-pass secure erase since that causes undue wear to an SSD and doesn't work like you think it does because SSDs work differently than hard drives where a multi-pass secure erase may be warranted (a single pass erase is usually sufficient anyway for a hard drive). Usually just a simple erase in Disk Utility is sufficient at destroying all data on the SSD (especially if TRIM is enabled, not possible to enable TRIM on an external SSD with macOS AFAIK). Some SSD manufacturers do provide a built-in hardware secure erase feature to an SSD which would require the manufacturer's proprietary app. A built-in hardware secure erase feature does not cause as much wear to the SSD as overwriting an SSD with data does.
