Many British acts of the 80’s owed their success to two things:
MTV (which was desperate for material, and videos had been running on Brit TV for at least a decade prior).
and Lady Thatcher (for her program of granting seed money for startup businesses to try and get people off the dole. The #1 use for those grants was recording studios!)
Rock n Roll has always been about rebellion, I think most just blindly went along, because that was what was expected of them. None of these “artists” wanted to be accused of being “sellouts”. Stupid, but it is what it is.