One Polish acquaintance of mine once told me:
The things you describe above are common traits of Polonia in US/UK but not so much Poles living in Poland or even Germany, France, etc. The Polonia is a different breed of Pole than those born in and living in Poland. Once Poles move to the West, they tend to become very materialistic, greedy, envious, etc and making money becomes their primary goal. This is due to communism having limited opportunities, Poles always being hustlers, and ostracism and loss of dignity if someone were to move to a wealthy western country and still be unsuccessful. Oftentimes, the women will gossip about who has a better family - why such as such husband hasn't bought a new ca, why such and such's son didn't get into a good college, why didn't such and such family show up at the weekly rosary, etc. It's mostly BS like that. But your friend is correct - a woman may come for someone's house to coffee just to pull someone's tongue and find out what's going on and then go and gossip about everything she learned all while playing the role of a good friend. This tends to be more common especially amongst young families that are FOBs and have 1st gen kids. Generally, the kids and westernized generations tend not to engage in gossip and petty rivalries. But yes, when Poles first come to a country they act very clannish for the simple fact that they rely on the community to get around with things like housing, visas/green cards, employment, etc. There are some people who came to US 10-20-30 years ago and still don't speak English that well. Amongst men it's clannish related mostly to employment as Polish men tend tow ork in the same fields and often make companies with each other, do jobs together, etc. A lot of the men if they don't speak English or have a high level of education they'll tend to go into construction trades. Poles are also weary of outsiders and tend to marry and be friends/hang out with their own kind.
In Poland though, the Poles are a bit different. For one, I think they're more culturally sophisticated and tend not to have the pettiness of the diaspora. However, one thing that has changes is in the past even up until the early 2000's it was common to have like 3 generations sharing the same home or condo. Now it's not like that. Kids tend to move out and do their own thing, some seniors have thus been left to fend for themselves especially those living in rural areas. There's also a lot of envy though but not like the backstabbing gossiping and such in the US/UK. I noticed even amongst my friends in Poland and some cousins like if I had a pair of some Italian brand sunglasses or some jordans they'd just have to have the same ones even if they couldn't really afford it. There's a ton of gold diggers too. There wasn't nearly this amount of young ****** like 10-20 years ago - some will try to drug you to steal your jewelry and wallet, another try to marry you so she can get citizenship and live in the west, a third will be an escort, a fourth will be a student looking for a sugar daddy, a fifth will be using you to make her bf jealous while getting drunk for free, all **** like that.