I have Nano 7 as well and I tried many things over the years. However there isn’t a good solution to this. I have a Windows 7 VM just for my iPod and installed an old iTunes just to put music on it. You can use Gnome Boxes for this job.
I suppose that’s the main problem, I didn’t check the article since the title reeks clickbaity enough. However I wouldn’t share an article if the the title obviously is a clickbait, I’m sure there are bunch of respectable sources about this development.
Even if you cannot connect to internet (normally that shouldn’t be a problem since VM use the internet through host machine), you can still download the said iTunes outside of the VM and install it via shared folder. In the end you don’t need internet to put iPod some music.