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Even if a company doesn't have a policy about creating a new account, it's a level of friction that is often a barrier for sharing with many reluctant partners. There are a lot of people out there who will not create a new free account or install a new free app for any random thing.

As far as I can tell, the main reason that Onshape requires an account creation is to possibly sell another seat or seats of Onshape. The last time I shared Onshape files with a customer (who didn't have a paid account) Onshape sales contacted them. It makes some kind of sense, but it also seems obnoxious and desperate.

I would request that Onshape looks very carefully at things like Dropbox or Docusign. Those services work well without account creation, and even if you do create an account the level of nagging and sales BS feels relatively low.

Yes, that's indeed somewhat contradictory, but the world is crazy.

No doubt creating and signing in to an own Onshape account is the best thing to do. But people are reluctant to commit, or their company guidelines require an approval process before whatever accounts may be created. I've been working for such a company myself. Approvals, while aiming to improve security, eventually slow down these things to a level of uselessness that frustrates employees and makes them develop workarounds of their own to circumvent the whole system, just so they can get their job done in time.

That said, we need some low-friction reasonably trustworthy sharing process that does not easily disclose data while nobody gets fired for using it. I think a password protected link sharing would just fit this gap.