Don’t mean to hijack your post but will disk utility allow you to erase the whole ssd? Including the restore partition? I’m trying to wipe the ssd completely and start fresh from a bootable usb c drive since I need to downgrade to Monterey and the Apple Store upgrade everything to Ventura including the restore partition
You’ll need a 2nd Mac connected through USB-C and Configurator 2 to do that. It’s a free download from Apple.
It will for external SSDs.
You need to jump through a few hoops to completely wipe the internal SSD in a way that will leave you with a usable system. An Apple Silicon Mac has two special APFS containers that must be present in order to boot anything, even from external media.
Unless you have a specific problem where you know you need to wipe and re-create those internal containers, don’t try wiping your internal SSD - just delete the macOS container and create a new one as a part of macOS reinstallation.
To wipe the internal SSD, yes. To wipe an external, Disk Utility will work just fine.