Create site offline

I just spent hours creating draft pages and learned that they cannot be
published because their is literally not a PUBLISH” option to do so.

I’m not sure what you mean – if you have a draft page – just reopen it and click “Publish” button on right side of page screen.

But to answer your other question, yes, you can install WP locally on your computer –

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/WordPress_Installation_Techniques#Installing_WordPress_Locally

But a local install won’t be connected to a site on a server and you will need to move the site when you want it to go live.