@Ifreitas absolutely would prefer to do that and have tried, but it seems my theme’s firm assumption is that this particular menu must be a page tree: it is not manageable as a widget or menu, it is built automatically from the page tree. Could go in and customize that behavior in the child theme, but it’s a little more than I’m looking to do just to get rid of an overly persistent error message…
Will keep hacking with it, but hoping Events Calendar might just let me dismiss the error somehow….