Microsoft Word still has the correct word count.

Using the Option-Right Arrow to move through the text a word at a time has a problem though. The cursor appears to gets stuck at that point, and MS Word shows the font changing.

I tested with AppleScript's "say" command, and it doesn't pronounce spaces, so screen readers are probably fine.

It might affect string handling where you split a string by space characters, and then compare words with a dictionary.

For example, Pingtype English which translates word-by-word to Chinese. (note the words "the" and "same" not getting translated in the examples).

https://pingtype.github.io/english.html

Google Translate handles it fine.