I tried to, but it gave my a cryptic complaint (about the drive lacking a “firmware partition”) that I believe wouldn’t be there if the internal drive had 10.13 or later installed.

Didn’t anticipate this as a problem, but should be solvable. Plan A is to move the original internal drive to an enclosure and boot from it in order to format and work with the new one.
Otherwise I’ll have to get creative about removing the screw I stripped and temporarily putting the original internal drive back in so I can format the new one.

And I’ll say this: even though the screen is busted, it’s nice to have a MacBook that isn’t dented and dinged to hell like my 2011 machine was when I got it. (That’s how I got it as cheaply as I did.)