Cannot access any utility menus when booting up my macbook air

I want to clean my Mac so I can give it to a friend, I already have a replacement. So, I want to wipe it clean and reinstall a fresh OS. To do that properly, I need to load from a bootable USB which I already have and have verified.

I cannot get into any of the utility menus when booting up my macbook air. It just goes directly to the login page. Options I have tried:

Option: Select source disk

Shift: Safe Mode

Command+R: Recovery Mode

T: Startup in target disk mode

D: Diagnostics Mode

Command+V: Startup in verbose mode

Command+S: Single user mode

What happens in all cases is that the login screen appears and in audio the system says "Voiceover On, Voiceover Off, etc." repeating that phrase until I release the other buttons. Once I log in, the system works fine. I just cannot get any of these utility menus to launch at startup.

I've tried going into System Settings and changing the Startup Disk to the USB; it's not an option. Is there any OTHER way to boot the system from the USB drive without going through these optional startup menus? Is there a secret way to access these menus after the OS has already launched?

System info: Early 2014 MacBook Air, 1.4 GHz Duel-Core Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB memory, running Big Sure OS. I am not using any peripherals, just the standard builtin keyboard and track-pad.