You can. Cmd+J will let you choose defaults system wide. This will be overruled if there are local settings manually selected for a specific folder.

If you want to force system wide view settings in finder, delete all DS_Store files and then do the thing with cmd+j

Officially that’s true, but I’ve been running OSX since at least .8, and in practice it just does not honour the “I want all finder windows like this” ideal.

Cmd+J never worked for me system wide. Tough it looks like it may be working in the latest Catalina versions.

Can confirm still broken in catalina.