I don't know what the law in California is, but such provisions are not very rare. The reason for them is to deal with e.g. landlords that rent without a writte

I don't know what the law in California is, but such provisions are not very rare. The reason for them is to deal with e.g. landlords that rent without a written contact, or various complicated fraudulent situations (subletting when that's not allowed, pretending to be a landlord, etc.). The premise behind them is that (a) depriving someone of a place to live should require a very high bar (b) property owners are expected to keep track of what's going on with their property. There's obviously abuse enabled by this, but the correct amount of renter-initiated abuse is not zero.