Aramco is still hiring a few high GC expats. The idea is to put them into key positions so they can help the incompetent local management make decisions or push initiatives through. The problem is that these new hires usually lack the political skills, connections and sometimes technical skills to survive. During my time, I was intimately familiar with two such cases.
The first one was an arrogant man from an IOC. He tried to bully his way through the company. I guess nobody told him that only locals with wasta can get away with being bullies. He wound up isolated from both expats and locals. After he made a mistake which could have been avoided by listening, he was kicked out by management in another year. This was long enough ago at the company that there were still some other expats who tried to help him, but he seemed determined to dig his own grave.
The second case was more recent. Aramco put him in charge of an area outside of his expertise. He was completely spinless and clueless, mostly hiding in his office. After two years of doing basically nothing, the company got rid of him.
These are just two cases where I have personal knowledge of the situation. I have heard of many others. The irony is that the vast majority of the remaining lower level expats are either too political or incompetent to be effective, so management brings in these high level expats who almost certainly fail without support from lower level expats. The best expat managers started out at a lower level, built connections with other lower level expats who were competent, and then leveraged those connections when they moved up. Most of those expat managers are gone now, they either retired or got disgusted and left. It has gotten to the point where entire departments have been lobotomized and do nothing but review work from contractors and generate meaningless internal reports.