How to change Calendar notification defaults offered in 10.14

I’d like to change the defaults that are presented in Calendar for the alarms. In prior versions of the OS, various posts say it was possible to edit the plist and set up custom alarms. With 10.13 and above, the key “PersistentMenu-lastUsedAlarms” in the com.apple.iCal.plist plist no longer seems to be there. One post suggested editing it in hex but my search proved fruitless for that, too.

Please note: this is not choosing the default alarm in Preferences for new events. I want to change the list of default alarms offered to me. In my case, I want to have an alarm for events 2 minutes before the event instead of the current 5 min. I can change this manually when making new events every time but I'd like to make this the default and permanent.

Has anyone accomplished this on 10.14? This Apple support answer has the best info so far: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3722779