[openknot]

>"For someone like me that has never had an Insta account nor have I logged into my FB account for over 8 years, how does one create an account without this happening?"

This is speculative, but probably try to recover your Facebook account first (because it's already verified), and then choose the option to try and create an Instagram account based on your logged-in Facebook account.

I haven't tried this in practice as I haven't created a new account in a long time, so there's no guarantee this will work. If it doesn't, then unfortunately you would have to block off time to persistently follow the instructions as closely as you can (sending your photo and a note), likely over several days to create the account.