The problem when you talk about "drive" is we don't know if you're talking about your USB drive or the internal HDD drive that you are installing Windows onto. These are 2 completely separate disks, and the only one that matters for Windows, in terms of partition scheme, is the HDD.
So when you say "a previously prepared drive created with the GPT partition scheme" I have to assume that you are talking about the USB drive, which, as far as Windows is concerned, and as I previously explained, is completely irrelevant to the Windows installer process, since it is NOT the disk you're installing Windows onto. It could be using a wild file system and your own custom partition scheme, and the Windows installer would be just fine as long as it can boot and read the installation files from it. So the fact that that drive is GPT is completely irrelevant to the whole installation process.
The only thing that matters to Windows is the target drive, i.e. the internal HDD. When Windows complains that it's unhappy with that drive because it's using the MBR partition scheme, I believe it, because if the only thing you did was create an USB installation drive in Rufus, you certainly did not change the partition scheme from that drive, which was probably MBR. And this is further corroborated by the fact that after you applied the 'clean' command to your installation HDD (which does remove the partition scheme), the installer was fine, since it could now create the partition scheme it wanted on that drive.
So really, everything you are stating above makes sense, unless you are indicating that you did attempt to manually change your target HDD to GPT partition scheme. But if that's the case, then you clearly did something wrong, since that's not what the Windows installer saw as being used by your target drive until you used diskpart.