How can I ensure nonbreaking spaces before every citation in pandoc markdown?

Question

Let's take this example:

• test.md:

  ---
  bibliography: test.bib
  ---
  
  This is just a test text to demonstrate that in some situations, unfortunately, citations will appear at the beginning of a line, which is often considered unaesthetic [@dominici2014overview].
  

• test.bib:

  @article{dominici2014overview,
      title={An overview of Pandoc},
      author={Dominici, Massimiliano},
      journal={TUGboat},
      volume={35},
      number={1},
      pages={44--50},
      year={2014}
  }
  

• acm.csl: http://www.zotero.org/styles/association-for-computing-machinery

Build:

pandoc test.md --citeproc --csl=acm.csl --bibliography=test.bib --pdf-engine=pdflatex -o test.pdf

This renders the PDF as:

(Note that the [1] stands at its own line.)

How can I make sure that there is a nonbreaking space before the [1] so that it does not appear alone in the line? The obvious solution would be to use a \ instead of a simple in the Markdown, but this would clutter my Markdown file, so I'm looking for an automatic solution such as a configuration or a pandoc filter instead.

I even tried to write a simple filter, but apparently, the nonbreaking space is ignored, and this would require me to handle special cases such as the beginning of the sentence, so I would prefer an existing solution:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import pandocfilters as pf

def add_nonbreaking_space(key, value, format, meta):
    if key == 'Cite':
        value[1] = [{**text, 'c': f"\N{NO-BREAK SPACE}{text['c']}"} for text in value[1]]
        return pf.Cite(*value)
    return None

if __name__ == '__main__':
    pf.toJSONFilter(add_nonbreaking_space)