Lets see if I got everything correct from your posts. I'll admit I'm a little confused because some information does not make sense.
You recently (within the past 30 days) got a late 2012 MBP from eBay. BTW - I only see a late 13" MBP with Retina listed (no DVD drive). Is that correct? If that is the model, then it only had Storage of 128, 256, 512, or 768 GB flash storage. No 1 TB hard drive (spinner).
You want to wipe the 1 TB old fashioned type of hard drive and install Mountain Lion and then High Sierra or Catalina.
You're wiping it in order to return it to the eBay seller within the 30 day return policy.
When you got the 2012 MBP, did it boot up okay and was it running Mountain Lion?
If the 2012 MBP was running Mojave or Catalina then the drive format would be APFS which is not recognizable by the Mountain Lion installer. The disk would NOT be a valid disk to install ML and would not show in the installer window. You would need to use Disk Utility to format the drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with a GUID Partition Map before installing ML.