From quickly messing around in the playground, it seems (in math mode) Typst treats multiple spaces identical to single spaces. A simple, consistent, flexible, and probably-not-majorly-breaking-old-documents rule would be “anything with no spaces has higher precedence / tighter binding than anything with one space, anything with one space has higher precedence / tighter binding than anything with two spaces”, etc, and then - only within each spaces category - you apply one of the precedence rulesets described in the article. Any confusion or surprise can be solved intuitively and without thought by mashing spacebar.
I agree with you conceptually, and am also laughing a bit thinking about how many people get angry about significant whitespace in Python and how much deeper down that rabbit hole "operator precedence changes based on whitespace" this proposal is :D