In my experience, this is not very true. I hear lots of pronunciations for words like gnocchi, usually until people are shamed into saying it correctly.
I agree that it's not universal amongst all native English speakers.
But otherwise, that's just a prescriptivist/descriptivist argument. What's "correctly"? You'll note though that there are only a few variations - native English speakers still generally agree, even if in multiple classes, and usually one class is a clear majority.
Because it is an Italian word, which is perhaps not as common a source for words as to have it ingrained into people’s brain, say compared to French.
But quite clearly there are lots of soft rules that should never be learned directly, but indirectly people do pick up (not only natives, I am not a native English speaker, yet I can probably guess an approximate pronunciation for unseen words that won’t be statistically too bad) — like how an ML model might do.
But otherwise, that's just a prescriptivist/descriptivist argument. What's "correctly"? You'll note though that there are only a few variations - native English speakers still generally agree, even if in multiple classes, and usually one class is a clear majority.