I've seen it used often for some compounds adjectives like well-known or chocolate-covered from that page, but never as a blanket rule across all compound adjectives. Most hyphenation rules they listed have exceptions anyway, so I'd argue that more-literal isn't a necessarily hyphenated adjective.

Either way, the OP is correct enough that there's no reasonable way to misinterpret it due to "the" appearing before the adjectives. "The more translations" (omitting the "literal") doesn't make sense, "More translations" would be ambiguous.

source? Nobody writes like that. You're just being needlessly pedantic.

You're literally wrong. "the" in the OP's title separates the "more literal" into its own descriptive clause.

Got any proof that it's incorrect, or are you just correcting people on the internet without any authority?

"the" makes it unambiguous

If we literally run out of helium, an inefficient fusion reactor would likely be more cost efficient than mining it from outer space.

We already know how to fuse helium, just not in an energy-producing way. If we were willing to accept the energy cost, we could fuse enough to keep essential systems such as MRIs online.