Reinstalling MacOS Sierra Problem (failing in the last 2 seconds)

Hello everyone,

Recently I purchased an iMac from my university's surplus auction. Part of the policy is to wipe the HDD/SSD of any machine they decommission. Currently I am in the process of reinstalling the OS from Recovery following the instructions here:

How to reinstall macOS - Apple Support

My machine has an intel cpu: i7-7700k so I followed the intel based instructions. Because the system could not see the disk I followed the instructions for erasing my disk here:

Use Disk Utility to erase a Mac with Apple silicon - Apple Support

After I did that (renamed the drive to Macintosh and then formatted it using the Mac OS Extended (Journaled) option) the installer could see the drive. The installation started normally but then in the last 2-3 seconds the installation keeps failing giving the following message:

"An error occurred while preparing this installation. Try running this application again."

I have tried the whole process of erasing and reinstalling mutliple times. I also made sure the system clock is in sync with time.apple.com. Also the whole installation is via ethernet and not wifi. The OS version that is to be installed (automatically) is MacOS Sierra.

Any suggestions as to why this is happening and how I can potentially fix it?