Knitting hadn't been invented when these were around - we know the Romans made gloves, socks, and other garments with a great deal of supporting evidence, there's not a single example of a mitten, nor of any kind of knitting like this. The Romans wove cloth on a loom and stitched it together. There's no signs of wear on any examples of the dodecahedra, so it's not a hand tool that comes into contact with wool or metals which would leave at least micro-abrasions. Whatever these were they were not a hand tool. It snows in north Italy, why wouldn't they need gloves in some places where it snows outside of Gallia? The knitting tool is among the weakest hypotheses in terms of evidence.
If journalists were to refer to these as a knitting tool it would be because they were lazy and didn't do any research into that hypothesis. In general journalists writing on this tend to acknowledge scholarly opinion that their use is unknown and hypotheses about it are speculative. The lazy journalists are the ones who write about how some Youtuber decided it's a knitting tool or whatever and uncritically repeat this without researching scholarly consensus or what historians and archaeologists have to say about the tool.
If journalists were to refer to these as a knitting tool it would be because they were lazy and didn't do any research into that hypothesis. In general journalists writing on this tend to acknowledge scholarly opinion that their use is unknown and hypotheses about it are speculative. The lazy journalists are the ones who write about how some Youtuber decided it's a knitting tool or whatever and uncritically repeat this without researching scholarly consensus or what historians and archaeologists have to say about the tool.