There are things they consider difficult. The building is responsible for all tenants in the building. Things like key card access to the building after hours, key card access to the parking structure, etc are all handled by the building. If the shared office space tenant is constantly asking management to revoke keys, issue new keys, etc, that becomes a pain point for them. In my experience, it was the key card access that was a huge problem. Also, each new tenant usually is expected to fill out some sort of credit/background check, and those cost money. Shared office space companies can have very high turn over, so each new sub-tenant would have to go through that process as well. The building management is going to want their company they trust to do it rather than having the shared space company handle it on their end. Sure, they can request the fees be re-reimbursed, but they still have to spend time/effort on it.

So imagine all of the things you have to do for a new lease. Multiply that by the numbers in a shared office space. People like doing the least amount possible. CBRE managed buildings prefer to have long term leases, so they only have to do this at the beginning of a lease, not constantly.

Assuming the sub-leasor wasn't trying being dishonest, they should remain the primary responsible party to the leasor. I work for a company and have never met the person owning the building, but if I wrecked the hallway the owner would quite correctly go and talk with my employer.

The only way I see this becoming an issue is if WeWork was being shifty about taking responsibility for damage and risk caused by their clients and if they were it wasn't so much "market disruption" as "we don't want to play by the rules but still want cake"

Maybe, but they are just "weird" about things outside of their comfort zone. I worked for a company in a CBRE building that had lawyers, financial planners, etc types of tenants. The company I worked for was a film/video post-production company. The obstacles the building put in place to the company to move in gave every clear indication that they really did not want that company as a tenant. For example, in the raised floor machine room, they wanted smoke detectors every 3 feet because of the "fire-hazard" VTR machines represent. All of the low-voltage video cabling for SDI video signals had to be run through EMT conduit. All low-voltage CAT-5 networking cabling had to be run through conduit as well. There were many more examples of the things that other tenants would not be asked to do. Also, a $1,000,000.00 escrow account had to be opened for the entire term of the lease. These are all sorts of things that make me think the building were just trying to find the point where the owner of the company was say it's not worth it. We've all been there with jobs that we don't really want, so we try to price ourselves out of the running with an outrageous bid.

Most of the items you cite are code requirements. Operators like CBRE maintain buildings to class A standards that don’t allow for any violations.

The $1M is escrow is standard and par for the course and a guarantee against credit risk. Many landlords actually require a letter of credit from banks so that if your company were to go bankrupt the money wouldn’t be subject to seizure by bankruptcy courts.

Source: Work at similar landlord.

edit: spelling