It is, pretty much, a shopping mall in the desert. Or several shopping malls. With a ski slope. And a giant aquarium that was always developing unnerving leaks when we lived there.
If you see the point of hotels being that you've gone somewhere interesting and far away that is too far from home to go home to sleep, hence you stay in the hotel -- in Dubai, the hotel is why you've gone. The accommodation has become the destination.
The Dubai 'government' (by which I mean Sheikh Mohammed and a few trusted family members) have been frantically trying to make there be some other reason to go there other than to stay in a hotel and sit by a pool in perennially hot, dry weather, but there isn't, really. The sea is polluted and too hot for much of the year. A few waterparks, some content-free pseudo-museums/folk parks, malls with clothes for seasons that don't exist locally in the windows. There used to be, maybe still is, a 'Dubai Festival of Shopping'.
There's no 'there' there, or of course there is, but it's not particularly pleasant.
White-collar crime, particularly money-laundering, a disproportionate number of criminals wanted overseas, often the ones who moved on from parts of Spain), a huge population of foreign prostitutes, who, like me (not married to partner and working freelance, so no work visa) are on tourist visas, going over the border into Oman once a month in a minibus, doing a U-turn and coming back, a heavily self-censoring press (because if you don't behave, you're deported, and criticism of the government or ruling family is forbidden), an underclass of exploited domestic and construction labour. Improperly desalinated tap water means a lot of people suffer hair loss unless they use bottled water to wash their hair.
I hope this has changed now, but when we lived in Dubai, it wasn't unusual for local papers to show photos of the dead bodies of labourers (who had run out into traffic so that their families would get the compensation money) to see if they could be identified. I know that some things changed in the legal reforms of 2020 (cohabitation was illegal when we lived there, and there were door to door searches in Sharjah, and I believe children born out of wedlock are now 'legitimate')
TL;DR -- as a tourist, there's no 'there' there. It's probably fine if your idea of a holiday is sitting by a pool, and you actually like the fact that there's nothing cultural or historical you 'should' be doing. As a resident, all the interesting things are nasty ones.