The UAE authorities know very well that they cannot block everyone. Even with the "gaping holes" in their firewalls, I won't be surprised if they block more that 90% of the local population from accessing restricted sites. That's probably good enough for them. The effort required to block the remaining 10% would be too high and not worth it.

In many cases it makes sense to spend more energy in extracting oil than the energy available in the oil itself. This is because oil is mobile energy. It can be easily transported and stored. Also, much of modern infrastructure depends on energy in liquid form, eg. cars, airplanes, farming equirpment etc. There may be plentiful nuclear, solar, coal, or natural gas energy, but it's useless in many cases because the current infrastructure can not use it. So it does make sense for example to use a certain amount of nuclear energy to get a lesser amount of energy in the form of oil.

In Dubai in the UAE as well as in most Gulf countries, VoIP is completely illegal, and the state run telcos use DPI technology to block it. This adds about 200ms of latency to *all* packets which the telcos think is an acceptable tradeoff to preserve their monopoly revenue.