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Diskmanagement.disenter error 49218
I used these steps to erase the drive and restore it to "factory":
menu: View / All Devices
select the parent of the damaged volume (in my case, "WDC WDS5 somelongserialnumber Media")
Erase
Note that this absolutely will wipe the contents of the drive. Not a big deal for me, it's just a Time Machine. If you need to recover your data, you'll probably need a tool like Disk Drill
What you're seeing in that tree is a representation of first, the physical media (you'll see the topmost says Apple SSD Media), then an APFS Container (an abstraction that lets the file system do some neat tricks with drive partitions), and then your actual partition. What I believe is happening is that the container was somehow damaged, so erasing the partition doesn't help, you have to go all the way to the physical media and wipe everything.
If you do want to recover some data, I would suggest…
menu / View All Devices
run First Aid on the container, and if that fails, the physical media.