Two major differences come to mind immediately:

One is that the location named in the question has the appropriate level of specificity (a city) for the image (which shows a city). The variations in geography shown in the image also provide an appropriate level of information to make the additional question of the approximate location the image was taken from reasonably answerable. I don't remember the specific question you mentioned, but I do remember another golf course question asked by - I'm quite certain, given your interest - the same person. Let's take that for comparison: it wanted us to locate a point somewhere vaguely near a city (not shown in the image), based on a photograph of a fireplace that happened to have some distant mountains in the background. Quite a difference.

The second - and probably more important - point is that the Rio question was asked by a user who seems to be legitimate. The golf course question was asked by an obvious sockpuppet who keeps using various accounts to ask the same stupid "I found this photo on reddit, there are probably dozens or even hundreds of other spots in the general area that look basically the same, but tell me the exact location of this one for some reason" question over and over. And then they come to meta with another account that has done almost literally nothing except argue in bad faith (pretending to be a third party) about those questions. For some reason they still seem to think they're being subtle about this, despite the fact that: a) numerous meta posts from various users make it clear that everybody sees through them, and b) I've personally told them directly at least three times now that they aren't. Frankly it's insulting how stupid "they" must think we are.