proceeds to instantly sell it at the next merchant

In modern games it’s more like finding 100 “Speak to X” entries in your journal and then futilely trying to remember what the fuck you are supposed to talk to them about because you acquired these quests 50 hours ago (often without any interaction from the player) and the game refuses to tell you. Bonus points when it’s actually a delivery stage for a fetch quest and when you find this NPC they just say “thanks bro for helping me out” and that’s it (last few BioWare games are especially guilty of that). And you have no idea what the hell did you do because it was so long ago.