For sure the pronunciation thing is real, either due to regional accents or linguistic divergence; I've heard it firsthand used unironically by Brooklyn and Philly Italian-Americans, as well as ample examples from television and movies. But writing it that way I haven't seen outside of Taleb (and Google seems to bear me out to some extent), and using it that way isn't wrong, per se, it's just an eye-rolling moment; someone trying too hard to show that it isn't book-learning, it's "street-learning".

Yes. My favorite example of that is risott, since that's something that people actually commonly order in restaurants.

Then there's also things like tirami-sue vs tirami-zoo, which don't even make sense since the dessert wasn't invented until recently.