That's interesting and it sounds like a solid proposition, yet I'd like to challenge:
Every other Germanic language (Dutch, Swedish, etc.) forms compound nouns this way.
I tried to check this with a rather recent word used a lot around here, namely Datenschutz-Grundverordnung (2 - 3 - 1 - 4), in English General Data Protection Regulation (1 - 2 - 3 - 4), in Swedish allmän dataskyddsförordning (1 - 2 - 3 - 4), in Netherlands algemene verordening gegevensbescherming (1 - 4 - 2 - 3) seems to compound the words in a different way. The German translation could have been done as to follow 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 ("Allgemeine Datenschutzverordnung"), but at the price of breaking up "Grund" and "Verordnung" and introducing an adjective to maintain the link over the whole construction. I would tend to think that general/algemene/allmän is an adjective and not a noun in all three other languages, thus the first space is a bit more than an orthographic convention.
Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be any other EU regulation that has been named "Grundverordnung" in the German version so far.
Romanic languages tend to swap 2 and 3 (Romanian: Regulamentul general privind protecția datelor (4 - 1 - preposition - 3 - 2)) and use prepositions more often.
On a tangent: How do you use "every other" in English so that it doesn't take the meaning of "Every other Wednesday I do sports"?