>>1706933This. As long as someone is paying to maintain it, the crew and staff is competent, and they have plans to pay for inevitable maintenance, they've got a working HSR line for the foreseeable future that at least some native Saudis will get use out of regularly. Whether they did it themselves or whether someone thinks they deserve it is much less consequential to it actually existing.
And failing common adoption for commuters, it's still got the important use-case of getting Hajj goers off of the highways and straight to the points of their pilgrimage with much less fuss and risk, which is one of the things that foreign Muslims are particularly sensitive about.