Can I status override an auto renewing membership?
This appears to have been implemented as a deliberate 'feature' to prevent users from making changes to memberships linked to recurring payments. See this related question for details:

How can you edit the end date for an auto-renew membership?

A fix has been merged into CiviCRM core (PR #15540) that fixes this issue for the end date field. This fix should be included in CiviCRM 5.20.