The middle east has a terrorist state doing a war of extermination in Gaza and is not afraid of committing genocides in many other middle east countries called Israel financed by America so it expand it's territory . You expect them to not spend heavily on missiles? I am pretty sure the sanctions on Iran affect the population a lot more than armament spending .

Nobody is going to start a war with the united states because of Nukes so there is zero excuses to invest that much on the army instead of improving people lives with things like universal health care

Also the 30k protesters killed in 2 days is bullshit, only idiots believe it because 15k is the number of jews killed daily in Nazi Germany and it took years of preparation for logisticss and camp building to do so

I mean that's just the classic realist security paradox, right? The Iranian regime feels, not without reason, like they need to have a lot of military options to keep themselves safe against both internal and external threats. Those options include missile forces, the nuclear program, the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, and a variety of regional proxies that can act in their interest and keep their regional adversaries from stabilizing and forming a real threat. However, having all those different security apparatuses makes other nations that have to interact with them (either because they're also in the region, or they rely on the Strait of Hormuz, or they would also die in a nuclear apocalypse) more likely to feel the need to increase their own security apparatus, which in turn increases the threat they can pose to Iran. Meanwhile the fact that all this investment is going into the military means that there are fewer resources available and less inclination to try and solve problems by other means, making it increasingly likely that any conflict is going to be resolved kinetically, which in turn further reinforces the need for all that military investment.