Ah, obviously you’re right and bash is less tolerant to spaces than I’ve had in my mind:

You can declare aliases that will last as long as your shell session by simply typing these into the command line. The syntax looks like this:
alias alias_name="command_to_run"
Note that there is no spacing between between the neighbor elements and the equal sign. This is not optional. Spaces here will break the command.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduction-to-useful-bash-aliases-and-functions