I still don't understand how creating these huge, unwieldy words is an advantage. If a useful word contains more than about four syllables people tend to shorten it, just like they would an English phrase.
Disclaimer: I'm German. I like my native language. But I don't think that it is more concise than English in any use case I can think of and while I feel that the article is interesting and amusing, it's not comparing the real world German to English. The examples are valid, the article didn't seem wrong, but .. I doubt that this has any significance.
Unwieldy is a crappy attribute of course. They aren't unwieldy. Foreign, strange to you? Sure, can't argue with that. Unwieldy though? Don't judge what you don't know.
I do know that lots of things become a mess if you try to translate them to German (with my background, on this board: You certainly don't want to learn about German words for mother/main board, stack or similar things. Or - let's do one: "Stack" was taught as "Kellerspeicher" for a while, which is the combination of "Keller"/basement and "Speicher"/memory).
Back to the original question: Aren't the general concepts the same, can't you capture the same stuff in exactly the same precision in English? Are we just talking about the way ~some~ concepts can be compressed into a single noun quite well vs. a succinct sentence?
That said, PC components mostly are very direct translations that IMHO work well. main board = "Hauptplatine", hard disk = "Festplatte" (which apparently in the beginning led to confusion to why the IT departments are ordering such expensive catering, but nowadays is established), ... are all easy to map.
The closest I can think of is "Tüftler", but that really doesn't capture the science-y aspect and is more hands-on. More the guy building a fusion reactor in his garage, less the group designing a radar device in some government lab.
I meant unwieldy in the sense that they have a lot of syllables. I assume Germans can pronounce these words without tripping over them.
As a native speaker, I definitely prefer "Parkraumbewirtschaftungszone" over "Zone bewirtschafteten Parkraumes", "Zone, in welcher Raum zum Parken bewirtschaftet wird".
The example may show that once you start chopping up a long word, you tend to end up with a pile of messy inflections and possessive pronouns.
In English, you might say something like "paid parking area", but I'd argue that would carry less meaning.
It can be a great deal of fun to force words together for the sheer perversity of it.
In English, on the other hand, I enjoy the less rigid grammatical structure and the ability to use phrases that can be nearly impossible to translate.