A lot of folks think that Knuth-Plass is the optimal solution for good looking text, for all text. It really only considers Latin, and even then has restrictions.
Some fonts have the space character in the kerning table, and possibly (although super rare) in the "ligature" table (gsub). (https://www.sansbullshitsans.com/ is an example of a font with a space in gsub, "paradigm shift" maps to a single glyph).
Fair, a lot of folks do treat it with probably more praise than makes sense. I'm sure I'm one of those people. :D
That said, my understanding is that there really was no "optimal" for the best way to arrange text. You can, effectively, make an objective function that you can optimize on; but there is no global "this will make text look good" algorithm.
Indeed, even ligatures are... debatable in utility. I personally like them; but I would scoff at any claims for any objective superiority of them. They are fun and a bit of a "flex" for laying out text on a computer. Any other claim is going to be tough to hold up.
Some fonts have the space character in the kerning table, and possibly (although super rare) in the "ligature" table (gsub). (https://www.sansbullshitsans.com/ is an example of a font with a space in gsub, "paradigm shift" maps to a single glyph).
If you want to go really deep on how complex some scripts are take a look at: https://r12a.github.io/scripts/arabic/arb.html#shaping