There's several components to unpack here, but at a high level your right.
>Something from WW is better than an empty building...WW might not pay out well, but it's better than nothing.
The deals, if they go through to the end of the lease, are a net positive for the landlord, and they are better than sitting on the empty space. One of the benefits to a WeWork lease is that sometimes they can aggregate hard to lease space under a single lease where the individual spaces might be hard to lease, or there might not be a tenant in the market to take all the space.
The flip side is that WeWork spends a LOT of money on their build outs, and expects the landlord to subsidize that through high TIs (tenant improvements) and a lot of free rent. This means that a WeWork lease will generally wind up costing a landlord a lot of money up front, and it will take longer for that lease to break even.
Yes it might be great to have a tenant like WeWork in the later stages of their lease, but it's always a question of whether they'll have the income in those later years to make it pay off. The other aspect of this is that if WeWork goes dark, your left with space that's like too big for the market (WeWork will take a lot of space off your hands) which is problematic, but their build outs will likely not be very useful for the next tenant. This means capital outlays by the landlord to break up and possibly "whitebox" the space.
The valuation side gets more complicated, so I'll just put that aside for now.
>Couldn't this be interpreted differently? That is, landlords are having less and less choice... It tells us about changes in the economy, as well as the health and strength there of?
I think it does, in a similar way to Uber and Lyft ushering in the "gig economy", but as a company, WeWork doesn't have the tech side of it to back it up. Landlords having less choice is partially of their own doing, and partially a response from companies themselves. Landlords have been pushing rents like crazy, and in many markets tenants are just tapped out. Some of the rent growth seen several years after the recession has moderated, but it's still out of the reach of many tenants that don't have the kind of credit or strong balance sheets that landlords love.
Companies, on the other hand, are changing their strategies and thinking about the utilization of real estate much differently than they were 10 years ago. Open floor plans are the biggest indicator of this, as it allows for more employees to be places in the same square footage. With the high rents of class A office in the city and significant commute times in many metros, companies are now more likely to entertain the idea of having multiple offices, with secondary offices leveraging cheaper spaces either in the suburbs or cheaper markets. Remote work and remote only companies go along with that, in that you need less space if you have a portion of your workforce that is never in the office.
In a way, WeWork is supposed to assist companies by providing them this flex space or their remote employees with a place to work. The problem is that it trades flexibility for cost in a way takes away a good amount of it's value proposition.