How were large Pali words perceived / understood originally?

I asked https://buddhism.stackexchange.com/questions/49491/how-to-break-pali-compound-words in which I tried to also ask the question I am asking here, but the answers focused mostly on how to break down Pali words (which I also find important). But for this question, I am wondering how ancient people perhaps conceptualized, read, spoke, or otherwise dealt with these large words? Were they said as a single utterance with a single linguistic stress syllable? Or were they considered like english "multi-word terms", and we just write them as a single word for some reason in modern romanization of Pali? Basically how were these large words or terms dealt with in the original context? I personally find the long words unwieldy and hard to pronounce because there is just so much, so wondering how the ancients did it, or how they thought of them.