Or maybe Apple was concerned that some systems might have additional volumes in the group and they didn’t want you to accidentally delete them as well. The only explanation I can think of is that maybe the macOS installer at the time had a bug where it failed to re-create the volume group correctly or where it expects you to pre-create the group first. If you’re deleting both of those volumes, then I don’t see why deleting the group would matter one way or the other. The volume group is an artificial construct to tie the system volume to its data volume. Note that it is not talking about the APFS container - deleting that would blow away the Recovery volume you’re booted from. I’m not sure why the March version of the instructions doesn’t want you to remove the volume group. Hopefully, the M1 macOS Disk Utility has something to prevent you from deleting (at least without really really meaning it) these internal APFS containers. But that is going to be pretty risky on an M1 Mac, since there are several pre-boot and recovery volumes whose deletion could end up bricking the computer (at least until manually reinstalled with Configurator 2).

a bootable system installer flash drive) first.

If you want to delete the entire disk, you would need to boot from something else (e.g.

If you’re booted from the Recovery volume, then you can’t delete the entire disk because that would delete the Recovery volume itself - which is in use. The article from August 2020 looks clearly wrong.

I deleted macintosh hd