There's nothing feudal about the absence of "allodial title" -- the absence of the possibility to "outright own your property". Empires, after all, never allowe

There's nothing feudal about the absence of "allodial title" -- the absence of the possibility to "outright own your property". Empires, after all, never allowed that either; they were not feudal, though, they were empires. Under feudalism is actually when legal systems began to recognise allodial title as such. To the old fashioned kings, "land to which you have an absolute title" was just "land I haven't conquered yet". When people talk about feudalism here, what they probably are referencing is the defacto inalienability of property under feudalism, and the consequent emergence of a small landed class who enjoyed revenues from a large labouring class. The inalienability and concentration was not due to one law or institution, but typically several together. Some wills outright forbade the inheritor to sell any of the property, if they accepted the inheritance. In some parts of Europe, all of the property was inherited by one son -- primogeniture -- tending to concentration. It was never the case under feudalism that there was no way to move into the landowning class -- some families moved in and some out -- but in practice families with land could very easily retain it. This changed only with the emergence of widespread trade and then industrialism, because these introduced much better ways to generate revenue from labor and led to a situation that might seem bizarre to us: poor gentry with vast landholdings and no money, and no way to generate revenue from the land since they couldn't invest in it, and no way to get outside investors because it was always "heads I win, tails you lose" when it came to collecting on the only asset of value the gentry had, the land. What California is doing really is feudal, in the sense of encouraging the concentration of landholdings in a semi-permanent group of families.