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Actually, it’s even more confusing. The IPA symbol is different from the Polish grapheme. IPA has a Tilde ~ as superimposed diacritic ɫ, and Polish has a struck through bar ł. [ ɫ -> w ] is a common sound change. In Bulgarian, you can see the change across colloquial varieties and the prescriptive standard. There /l/ is velarized and labialized [ɫʷ], so drop the tongue and you get [w]. The phone answer alo /aɫo/ becomes [awo]. They call the [w] realization ‘lazy l’, and it is stigmatized in higher registers, but at least a free variation allophone in reality.
My best bet for the Polish letter is that it literally shows that this l is not an l anymore, so it is struck through. I guess writers felt it became necessary after the emergence of minimal pairs to avoid confusion.
My best bet for the IPA symbol is that they made a conscious choice to use a slightly different symbol to distinguish it from the Polish grapheme. I’ve never seen the diacritic used on anything else though. You could argue it isn’t the best choice, but we’re stuck with it now.
Great catch! 🙂
The phenomenon is called gemination, by the way. It’s phonemic in Italian, as you pointed out. To our German ears it is very difficult to hear, but I have been taught a trick to pronounce it, which is imagining it as two words, like [mad dʒo]. In German and English, we assimilate two adjacent sounds at the same place of articulation, but the time of closure remains, so the result is very similar. Gemination is actually quite common across the world. You could consider us Germanic speakers the weird ones. 😀