But how could title information be decentrally controlled? How would random 3rd parties running a node (and why would they do this? What would be their compensation?) be able to verify anything about the state of some thing that exists in the physical world like claim to title? How is consensus reached? If one reads the chain, how do you verify what it says is true?

All of this still requires a central authority to decide these things, so they should just manage the database themselves. The "public" would not be permitted to just write to this permisionlessly.

These are private/business blockchains, not public ones. Again, know nothing about the CA DMV case so no idea what the rationale is.

And, yes, in a lot of cases, it makes more sense for one entity to be the sole arbiter of truth.

In what sense are they "blockchains" (as understood in the "crypto" sense) if they are not de-centrally written to? Is there proof of work? Distributed consensus? Can the public read entries from the ledger and verify something cryptographically?

Who is the arbiter of truth in private/business blockchain? Public blockchains that produce currencies reward operators of nodes with a token that is self-contained within the system. How does any of this map to private/business chains, or any other "blockchain" that is somehow mapping some truth state external to the chain into it? It seems these words are thrown around without any meaning, for marketing purposes.

>as understood in the "crypto" sense

The two only share some characteristics.

It's sort of unfortunate that blockchain was ever used as a term for business distributed ledgers. The Hyperledger Foundation has a ton of material online. (As do many others.) Proof of work is not used. The ledger is typically not open to the public or only to a limited degree. There are various other consensus mechanisms depending upon the requirements.