Preparing old MacBook Pro for trade-in issues - no disk utility options

Did you select the Language to see what appears next? Sometimes Apple has you select the language before presenting you with the main recovery mode screen.

Is your old laptop using a hard drive or an SSD? If it uses a hard drive, then enable Filevault and let the encryption process finish completely before you go to use recovery mode to erase the drive. If you don't have Filevault fully enabled first, then you should write a single pass of zeroes to the hard drive using Disk Utilities "Secure Erase" option (if it is still available with more recent versions of macOS). If you don't use at least one of these options, then your personal data will still exist on the hard drive that can be accessed by a standard data recovery app.

bdietz94 wrote:

I've gotten through all of the steps as described on https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201065 but when I go forward with the last step, and attempt to erase my hard drive then reinstall macOS it seems to skip the disk utility step in which I erase my hard drive. Here's what happened:

I started on the first step of using disk utility to erase my Mac for intel-based Macs. When I start it up with simultaneously holding Command R, it presents the language selection screen as if starting all over.

What should I do next? This makes me think I didn't have to go through with all those other steps, but I want to protect my information and do this trade in process correctly.

Try Option Command R for Internet Recovery