Trouble restoring an older 2011 iMac to factory settings

I've been trying to simply restore an older 2011 iMac to factory settings, which is a task that I thought would be relatively painless to accomplish but has turned into quite a daunting endeavor and is making me want to just shoot some bullets into the screen! Let me explain...

I went into the restore mode, which opens up Mac OS X Utilities and has the four options: Restore From Time Machine Backup, Reinstall Mac OS X, Get Help Online, and Disk Utility. First thing I did was go into the Disk Utility and erase the main Macintosh HD to clear off everything from the previous owner. Worked great! Next, I went to Reinstall Mac OS X, signed into my WiFi, went through the menus and began installation. Here's where the trouble begins. About 10 seconds went by and then I got a message that said "Can't download the additional components needed to install Mac OS X." Game over! I went online and tried to find out why this message would show up, and I read various different suggestions like going into the terminal and setting the clock back...didn't work.

So I went through and found out that another possible method is to install through a bootable thumb drive. I gave that a go by downloading the 10.7 DMG onto my Mac mini with M1 chip, copy/pasted that onto a thumb drive, then went into the 2011 iMac in the recovery mode, went into Disk Utility, used the "Burn" tool to get the .dmg to appear on the left side list of drives, then did a Restore that put that .dmg onto a different thumb drive. I thought, hey, maybe this'll be the answer! Well, unfortunately not, because I tried to restart and boot into recovery mode using the drive and all that would show up is the primary hard drive. I even tried resetting the PRAM...no help!

I'm hoping I've described my process thus far well enough, but I'd be happy to try and fill in any grey areas for anyone who might be kind enough as to offer any advice for where to go from here. I just want to restore this old 2011 iMac to factory settings to be used by another family member, as it should be a decent enough computer despite it's growing age to do basic tasks like web browsing and writing text documents. Any help would be very much appreciated!