Golf is a Kind of expensive hobby around here, or at least it’s considered expensive. This makes golf an elite hobby and people with money tend to care about optics. Sadly.

Germany.

I work in forestry. We got several courses round here and they are all the way you described as high class. We don’t get any low end places like you describe here.

A golf course is dead ecologically speaking. Mowed gras supports nearly zero biodiversity. Compare it to any natural meadow and you’ll easily see why golf courses are a joke. Having a few token species (mosquitos, ducks) that thrive everywhere is no indicator of ecological viability. Get a bat coder and find some bats, find smaller snakes, rodents and newts, then you got a living thing going. The soil deteriorates without natural cover, cultivated grass shrubs don’t retain a root system that supports a healthy soil. Instead nutrients and so on are washed out over time. Fauna dependent on nutrient enrichment by plants growing on the soil slowly dies until there is none left to incorporate eventual nutrient rich matter. Just because it might look „nice and alive“ doesn’t mean it is. It’s an ecological wasteland, optics don’t really play a role in that.

Big animals don’t have a lasting ecological impact when the soil is dead. A golf course has no viable shrub cover, no insects to speak of, no real living soil, nothing. It’s basically a dead presentation field for some larger animals that abandon it after social functions. The area itself is not much more suited for live than a parking lot. Which also has wildlife visiting.

Every golf course is a dead ecosystem pretending it’s alive.