I should absolutely be able to sell my license to a game to another person. It’s bizarre that I can in the physical world

Actually you can't, since most PC games contain Valve's DRM, even if you buy a physical copy :). So best you can do is sell your Steam account and risk getting banned.

Edit:

Also from just a platform standpoint it’s absurd I can’t disable updates on steam

People have told me that you can do that now. But once you update, I doubt that you can go back to the previous version if the new one turns out to be worse. Devs can literally remove features from their games. Most patches are useful though, so if your only options are getting all updates or not getting any, it sucks.