[sudosysgen]

I guess our disagreement is on whether you should judge by practical or theoretical powers. In practice, the emir of Qatar to give an example, is not prevented by the constitution to realize any concrete action, up to and including changing the interpretation of the constitution (or the constitution itself). These actions can be done practically in complete accordance to the law and without coercion by various mechanisms.

This is not a situation similar to ephors, or consuls, or British monarchs (which never were able to establish an absolute monarchy - King Charles was executed essentially due to his attempt to introduce French-style absolute monarchy.

It is similar to the Roman kings, but those were generally considered to be absolute monarchs. That's how I learnt it in college and Wikipedia seems to agree. In many ways the Qatari emirs are even more powerful - the Senate had the right to refuse the nomination of a King indefinitely and they were subject to an election.

It's different from a typical constitutional monarchy where the King would have to break the law to exert his will - in the case of Qatar and Kuwait, the King doesn't even have to break the law or coerce in order to do what he wants, he just needs to do a bit of a dance. This goes beyond even the concept of a semi-constituonal monarchy where the monarch has executive powers, in these cases the king has absolute executive and judicial power as well as most of the legislative power. Many people consider this to actually be an absolute monarchy, because it legally allows the monarch to do literally anything.