Unfortunately, I don’t know enough to intelligently comment on this. I was largely under the guidance of my professor. However, I can tell you that in my modeling I used the paraxial approximation and that the light was linearly polarized. It was my understanding that only circularly polarized light carried intrinsic angular momentum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_angular_momentum_of_light...).

Also, I would agree with you that in a uniform electric field, a single E vector in isolation would appear to produce a torque on a point some distance away. But if the rest of the field is considered, the net torque at that point would be zero, right?