I don't know if you've ever done French knitting or not, but you need to use a tool to lever the wool over the pegs. Something like a crochet hook. Traceology is the term sometimes used by archaeologists for examining this kind of wear, and they're pretty good at it - Aaron Deter-Wolf[1], for example, studies needles to determine if they were used for sewing or for tattooing.
Weaving, yes, and nålebinding is ancient (6500 BCE) but for some reason knitting doesn't seem to turn up until 10th century Egypt. Fabrics do get preserved sometimes, and knitting, like nålebinding, has the advantage of being portable. You'd think, if the technique was discovered significantly earlier, there'd be something to show it. A pair of knitting needles in a tomb somewhere, at least. After all the floors of iron age round houses seem to be littered with loom weights[2], and needles are also common finds. So where are the knitting needles?
For me, it's the gold examples that put the fly in the ointment of every theory (including my favourite). One imagines a Neopythagorean cult or something, but then you'd expect the geographic distribution to be different.
The peg spacing is a very good point and maybe the disqualifier.
I'm very dubious about the knitting claim. Woven textiles seem to go back 27,000 years. Knitting is just weaving, with fewer steps, using sticks.