Would it be useful in Chinese? I thought each character is basically a word. Or is that only sometimes true?

Spaces would be useful when reading Chinese. Words are composed of (usually) 1-3 characters. Each character has a particular meaning. Word have their own meaning, independant of the meaning of the characters used.

Often the meaning of the characters in a word kinda implies the meaning of the word, but that's not reliable at all. Sometimes the characters in a word are used just for their sound.

As once it was explained to me, most ideograms can be used as an independent word, but most words are 2 or 3 ideograms long. If I remember correctly an example was faucet=water+dragon

Faucet is dragon 龍 + head 頭. This mostly comes from the shape looking like a dragon statue, and water is stongly associated to dragons.

Thank you for the correction, probably my memory got confused over time.