I’m an American living in Dubai and the negative things people point out about Dubai are pretty laughable.
First of all, it is not expensive. You can choose to buy expensive things, but the general cost of living is lower than in the U.S.
People also love to bring up the different classes and “slave” labor which is a big LOL. Yes, people from third world countries do a lot of the dirty work here. Yes, in a perfect world this would not happen. Let’s not pretend the U.S. doesn’t do the exact same thing with illegal immigrant labor and that the labor system in the U.S. doesn’t have the exact same goals and outcomes for people.
The low class workers here generally enjoy a higher standard of living than their home countries and if you tried to give them better circumstances most wouldn’t know what to do with it, they are uneducated and filthy for the most part. They form communities with people from their home countries and provide for themselves decently with facilities that somewhat resemble where they are from typically.
People love to point out a couple negative things about Dubai and ignore the amazing architecture, opportunities, lifestyle, safety, organization, etc. America has a lot of deep problems. Here has some too, of course, some pretty bad like LGBTQ etc. But on the whole it’s a very organized society. Look inward to unsafe cities, city streets full of homeless people’s piss and sh*t, rampant youth mental health issues.
As far as culture goes, the culture here is for everything to be nice and super cool but yeah for non emirati at least it doesn’t go much deeper than that.