Custom post type suppress transition from future to publish

Question

The $post you’re working with is a WP_Post Object and you must interact with it as so.

$post->post_status="draft";

It’s usually not a good practice to modify the $post object directly so it’s something you may want to avoid. A better way may be to simply pass an array of values to wp_update_post() function like so:

wp_update_post( array(
    'ID'            => $post->ID,
    'post_status'   => 'draft',
) );