Sub workspaces cause issues if they have content in them that is not merged back to a parent before the parent is published.
If someone creates a workspace, October changes. Then someone else creates weekly sub-workspaces. October Week 1, 2, 3 , 4. Then forgets to merge one of the sub spaces back into the parent workspace before the parent workspace is published... the content is left in an unstable state. It is locked by a sub workspace that already had its content all published when the parent was published.
There isn't any "status" on a workspace in core to block publishing the parent if there are non published sub workspaces. I think we have to somehow publish all the children when a parent is also published.
Active
11.0 🔥
workspaces.module