There are 10 million people living in the UAE, 90% of which are expats. Lots of them live comfortable lives in the sense that they do what most people do - get jobs, have kids, do their daily routine, meet their friends, and all that regular stuff. They live normal regular lives and find fulfillment in those things.
It's no different than anywhere else in the world. If you live in UAE you'll find plenty of positive stories.
One thing I always laugh about is that my parents (who live outside of the USA) will text me asking about housing prices in my area, bad weather (that happened in a different state), some protest downtown (that I didn't even hear about), riots from police brutality and if it affects me, etc. But nobody seems to know that my neighborhood had a pot-luck where all the kids were having fun and the parents got a chance to meet each other and get to know the new people in the community.
It's no different living outside of UAE and hearing about UAE.
If 10 percent of the country's population is native, they are surely benefiting from subsidized education, housing, preferential (read: racist) employment, free land, and so on.
It's VERY different from most places in the world, except for other sister nations that depend on oil wealth and have the same luxuries in immigrant exploitation.
Given that all the Indians I know think positively of Dubai, I'm inclined to think that it's very few of them, because surely they'd hear about slave conditions from people who went there before anyone else.
If you've ever been to Dubai, you'd know it's full of people from the subcontinent. Why would it be so full of them if a substantial fraction of them are kept as slaves? It just doesn't make sense. It's mostly the Western white crowd, as opposed to non-white immigrant populations, who think these sorts of things about Dubai.
edit: example of what I mean: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30387801
Dismissing all those people looking for a better life as "slave labor" just doesn't make sense.
Is 1% acceptable in your book vs. the majority of the workforce being in slave-labor-like conditions?
It's not ideal, but yeah. I definitely wouldn't look down on an entire city for not being able to root out that last 1% of corrupt employers.