I don’t believe they are the same. They are options for JIT compilation which would be something analogous to running the ptxas tool, so I’m expecting something like options like you might specify for the ptxas tool. But that is just my own conjecture; I don’t have an answer here. When you find a deficiency in the documentation, you are welcome to file a bug.
Regarding the difference in parameter type specification, I think that the formatting of multiple options here is supposed to be such that they are all passed in a single string, rather than in an array as in the previous case (for nvFatbinCreate).