Adding a note for people who might be asking the same kind of questions:
Hello, I want to enable BitLocker on the system drive on my new Dell Optiplex Micro 5000 (i5, 8GB, 256GB M.2 SSD, 1TB HDD, Windows 11 Pro).  I am unclear about what the best path to follow to reduce the possibility of failures.  My thought was: I thought step #2 above was a good idea, in case something falls through, but Dell's OS recovery for Windows 11 seems to be from SupportAssist only, not needing any recovery drive.  It's unclear to me if Microsoft's recovery would restore things to a working state, as Dell seems to have OEM partitions that need to be there. My sets of questions (I am not all clear, so please bear with me.) are: Any helpful feedbacks / thoughts would be appreciated.  Thank you.  
Dell Optiplex Micro 5000, Windows 11, & Bitlocker