Does anyone know how to change the default Inventory status to something different? NS automatically defaults to good but what if we wanted to default to hold? What would be the best path forward

See if there's a configuration setting you can change first. I don't know if this is the same thing as what shows up in a line item's Inventory Detail subrecord, but if it is, I have successfully used suitescript to change it from its starting value to something else, e.g. "Good to "Hold" or vice versa.

Okay. I don't think there's a setting that I can change.

I did this for a food company where the product went on hold first until QA released it for sale. We just put the inventory into a Default QA warehouse that was “unavailable”. Whenever we got QA approval, that batch would be moved into the regular warehouse in NetSuite.

Should be under list/supply chain / inventory statuses (from classic center navigation) You can set the default by editing items in list (on a go forward) if you were always wanting a different status than good