I’m still not sure of the original version, but given that I’m at version 3.6 on my laptop, it looks like a multistep process.
Fortunately, in my case, the critical data is backed up as JSON files, so it is probably faster to kill the old database and then rebuild from JSON.
Is there an easy way to tell what version of Mongo the database was built under? That might help for a more informative error message.