The German is only worse because we want to treat it worse, the sentence isn't much longer and they're broadly equal in conceptual cost.
Which isn't surprising since Anglo Saxon is at the heart of the non French bits of English.
Exactly. It’s not like you can even hear the absence of spaces in one or the other. It’s purely a writing choice.
And I think the use of spaces between pieces of nouns in English has more to do with the fact that -- in comparison to German -- the pronounciation is so unpredictable from the spelling that not having the visual indicator between pieces could leave you completely lost -- "what word is this?" Whereas German has very regular and consistent rules of pronounciation that map closely to spellings, so once habituated you can scan it from the page and spit it out more reliably.
Still, having grown up with English as my first language and (partially) learned German as a young man, learning German gave me more appreciation for English. Which only grew once I studied a bit of Anglo-Saxon. I love our language, there's just something about its character.
A spelling reform would be nice (though entirely impractical) though.
If you enjoy English and German but want something with a more modern twist, might I suggest Dutch? I started learning it about 3 years ago and it's very regular in terms of spelling/pronunciation. Once you learn the irregular verbs (the most common ones, like in any language it seems...), many things will just "make sense", especially if you already know English and German!