Yes / you can buy alcohol. Yes / you can buy pork meat. It is just 2-3 times more expensive than in normal world.
But do not expect improvement in terms of hours flown, off days or leave granted.
But for sure you can expect that every 1 or 2 year you will experience major reduction in your lifestyle/benefits. It can be anything / they will reduce medical benefits. Or they will force you to live in company accommodation. Or they will announce that accommodation allowance is not an option anymore (unless you support local real estate market and buy sth in dxb). Or like few weeks ago they will announce new procedure regarding visitors in company accommodation. Every reduction is minor by itself. Small things like you said. But when you add them all together, you will understand source of frustration, continuous complaints, etc.
EK doesn't care if you are happy. As you said it is just a business and once in dxb you are only one of resources required to run this business.
What EK cares about is communication &
PR. Communication outside showing that we are happy family, we are real gold, talents like they say....
And communication inside, between us. If something negative appears in this communication, something that destroys this ideal picture they love to quickly close such communication channels. They did it few years ago with pprune (banned in uae without vpn), they did it with our previous FB group at the beginning of pandemic, etc.
Again, small things when looking at them separately, but when added up, it can be too much for some of us. Think twice Buddy!!