May I suggest that you have the “Classic Widgets” plugin installed. That plugin enables the classic widgets settings screens in Appearance – Widgets and the Customizer and disables the block editor from managing widgets.
That may make it a bit easier for you during the initial setup, as will disabling and and all optimization and cache plugins at this time.
I somehow missed the “column” setup. Yes, it was defaulted to 4. I changed it to 1, and now the footer is displayed correctly. Thank you very much for your help!