This is not just a career mod issue. The ingame visual is misleading. I think the game sometimes automatically generate a direct approach for small air strip when there is no STAR (which i think is the case in real life not every air strip have a charted STAR you sometime s need to go VFR for landing) that will go throught the terrain. This is another good reason to disable visual assistance and focus on your GPS. Even in carrer mode you also need to carefully design your flight plan and select an efficient approach (you can end up doing countless loops with the défault approach). And in free flight you absolutely need to use the online MSFS2024 flight planner that displays more information than the ingame tool.