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There are states where ethnicity matters and linearizing different interest groups will (a) not always be possible and (b) result in some ordering which is drastically different from from the general usage of "left" or "right".
I mean, look at the Knesset. I am not an expert in Israeli politics, but Wikipedia describes Ra'am as "an Islamist and conservative political party". They sit on the far left, but apart from ethnic concerns would probably belong right of the center -- where none of the Zionist parties would have them in a coalition.
(Of course, another anomaly would be the dirty trick when labor tried to form a coalition with the ultra-orthodox, but you can argue that the fate of that attempt is mostly proof that cutting out a middle party on the political spectrum does not work.)
In Germany (where I know the politics a bit better and they are simpler -- the Bundestag does not have a zillion different shades of blue and red like the Knesset on Wikipedia), a counterexample would be the Grosse Koalition.
German major parties go left to right (WP Bundestag colors in parenthesis):
(This is how they are arranged in the Bundestag, there is a case to be made that the Greens are actually left of the SPD.)
Take the 2005 Bundestag. Nobody wants to form federal coalitions with the Linke or the AFP (so far), so the following would get you a majority:
Per your "arranged by compatibility" argument, one of the first two options would be favored, covering as little as the political spectrum as possible. Even if you agree with me that the Greens really ought to be placed on the left of the SPD, an "Ampel" coalition would seem preferable.
The reason that they ended up having a grosse Koalition instead was that while seated next to each other, FDP and Greens had major policy differences. These differences are not well reflected on the traditional left-right-spectrum. The Greens wanted to shut down nuclear power plants, impose a speed limit on the Autobahn and generally have stricter environmental standards. The FDP wanted none of these. In the end, it was easier for SDP and CDU/CSU to compromise than to reconcile FDP and Greens. Three out of the four Merkel cabinets were such coalitions (the other was CDU/CSU+FDP).
To be fair, getting the FDP into the coalition boat would have been possible policy-wise without to many concessions, but other considerations made this unfavorable. (At an election, the previous administration is mostly not seen positive. Having the stink of culpability in the failures of the previous administration on you has to be balanced with being able to point your constituents to specific policy wins your ministers accomplished. This means that you generally go for the minimum viable majorities -- and the grosse Koalition already had a solid majority.)
I've always thought the FDP was to the right of the CSU.
In a political compass model, the FDP was to the right of the CDU on economic issues and to their left on social issues. (The CSU is a Bavarian party which has caucused with the CDU since forever, but is the farthest right of all the respectable parties on both economic and social issues because Bavaria is the Texas of Germany).
The fact that it is easy to explain the difference between the FDP and CDU but hard to given an unambiguous answer to "which is more right-wing?" is itself evidence against the 1D left-right model.
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The FDP is kinda libertarian. On economic issues, I would place them to the right of the CDU/CSU.
But on purely social issues, they are clearly left of the CDU/CSU. For example, the Ampel recently legalized cannabis (with some caveats). This is not a position currently compatible with the CDU/CSU.
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Ra'am working more closely with the left parties despite having more in common with the conservative parties from a naive view is exactly what I'm describing. My model accepts that as normal behaviour, whereas most models would need to add a bunch of epicycles to explain it away.
I agree that this is a solid counter-example that goes against my model. But as you say, when you factor in voters eventually growing upset with the ruling coalition resulting in some real politik, it makes sense that the cost isn't worth the benefit for small parties. Did the FDP still mostly vote with the Grosse Koalition even if they weren't officially part of it, or did they do a lot of protest no votes?
The problem with classifying Ra'am as far-left is that this is that it flies very much in the face of common usage.
I guess German opposition parties vote against bills proposed by the governing coalition. Perhaps more so if the bill would contain a lot of messy details to nitpick over, and less so if the bill reflects a wide consensus in the population.
In times of stable majorities, the votes of the opposition do not matter for the outcome. It is mostly public perception "How could you vote for this?!" vs "How could you vote against this?!". One way to square the circle is for opposition parties to introduce their own bill -- which generally won't pass, of course. This signals "we care about this topic" without any risk of getting blamed for negative outcomes of the coalition bill.
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