You can't choose which abilities your squadmates use, only direct who they should attack

It kinda sorta worked but not really. I haven't played DAI in a long time so I don't remember the exact mechanics and what triggered what, but it's like others pointed out already; even if you gave the command to Hold, even if you used it on a location, it didn't matter. There were "things" (like I said I don't remember the specifics) that would simply make your party members "forget" any and all commands and do whatever.

For me this has meant that I completely abandoned the party play in DAI, which is something I loved in DAO for example, and instead focused on soloing everything. The party members were at best a minor distraction. And in dragon fights they were all dead in the first few seconds of a battle if left unchecked. If you do a super micro-managing of the party, they can be good. But my problem was not that it would have been difficult (in DAO I had all tactics disabled and I was giving each party member commands on everything, down to where to move, where and how to attack, what to do after attacking, etc, so difficulty wasn't a problem), it was that it was a very badly designed system. When companions "forget" your commands with no in-game explanations and instead because of bugs/glitches/bad programming, then I can't be bothered with that bs. So KE was my saving grace Luckily I had already a few pt's done before they took a giant poop on poor KE