Can I swap my old hard drive into my new machine?

My 2011 MBP suffered from a dead short by the LVDS connector, which burned the board :-(. The problem is the cost of repair the damage was about as much as a replacement system, so I decided to get a identical 2012 instead. I’m not happy about why I had to buy it, but my hard drive is fine so I can make it like nothing ever happened by swapping the drive over.

Anyway, everything else about it is fine outside of the screen and board - including my hard drive so I still have plenty of reusable parts to pick at. I can drop the old hard drive into my new machine and be back where I am, but my replacement shipped with Sierra AND I updated to High Sierra (no APFS). To make it so I can run it for data recovery, I put Kapton tape over the LVDS connector and LVDS cable so I don’t have to worry about the short. Since my replacement is not on High Sierra, I don’t know what kind of updates I need to run to get the EFI firmware current or if it’s even an issue at all.

Once I install High Sierra and check the EFI is current, is it still possible to switch hard drives between systems with very similar hardware? I know it worked in the past but the EFI updates changed things dramatically.