The "welcome" US citizens get when dealing with the US CBP types has gotten worse over the course of the last ten years, and it certainly hasn't improved for foreigners who may have the US as an option.
As a US citizen, I find that I am less likely to be poorly received when visiting Malaysia and having to deal with passport control at KUL or when going from SIN to J.B. than when returning to the US and having to deal with CBP. I doubt that GCC nationals are going to be generally better received by the CBP than I.
I am not sure how much Malaysians ordinarily appreciate Saudis (other than for the money brought in), but I do know that I'm more likely to get a warmer reception from my GCC friends if I suggest meeting up in Europe or Asia or Africa than meeting up with them in the US. It's rather unfortunate as a substantial chunk of them have lived in the US in prior years. [I would most probably not know many of them if they had not been living in the US previously.]
The GCC nationals who now live in the US (whether for school, work or permanently) seem to have far fewer siblings, cousins or friends from their home country visiting them in the US now than used to be the case even when oil prices were less than a third of what they have been at during the last five years.
That kind of suppression of tourism is a result of visas becoming harder to get and/or increased chances of getting a visa declined for reasons that have nothing to do with the individual visa applicants' actual likelihood to violate the terms of entry associated with the visas.
Bad news spreads in a way that good news rarely does. And the bad news covers the in-person dealing with US embassy/consulate facilities for visa-acquisition purposes; and it also covers having to put up with US DHS -- CBP and TSA (if connecting onward or when flying out of the US) -- and perhaps even ending up hassled on the basis of nationality if not also on the basis of ethnic and/or religious identity.
As Saudis haven't even been very popular in Pakistan -- the South Asian line often being that Saudis are (monied) hypocrites (as if any country is without hypocrites
) -- I would be surprised if they are very popular in Malaysia either. .... and yet I would be surprised if the average Saudi visitor to Malaysia would be asked as many questions by Malaysian passport control as CBP asks even some US citizens who are as free and innocent as can be.