re-installing MacOS on macbook with bad OS install

We had a laptop that was in a bad state after a failed OS upgrade. It was trying to autoboot to the installer, but the installer claimed that the macbook didn't support that OS version. After looking up the valid latest OS version for the macbook, I followed the instructions in this macworld article to load a MacOS installer on a thumb drive and install MacOS on the broken macbook. I chose to format (erase) the hard drive using disk utility before installing MacOS.