Two ways of deploying printers via group policy

Solution 1:

That's because there are two GPO-based ways to deploy a printer. You found one of them. The other:

User Configuration -> Windows Settings -> Deployed Printers (You need Print Services component installed to see this.)

It's that location where the Print Management MMC puts the deployed printers. Both methods will send a printer to a client, though they use slightly different methods for actually making that happen.

WHY did Microsoft allow two deployment methods? That I can't tell you, though it's probably based on the fact that the entire "Preferences" part of a GPO was an add-on that used to be supplied by a separate company before Microsoft bought them out and it's still with us for legacy reasons.

One difference between the two, though. With the Preferences method, you can set a printer as the Default Printer for a user. You can't do that with the Windows Settings method.