JJ - Have you heard of Hitchcock's "Maguffin"?
It's the element in a story that drives the plot, even though it might be almost forgotten at the end of it.
The RN would never have had a CATOBAR carrier had they argued for it directly in the years leading up to the 1998 SDR. Instead (and quite sincerely) they advocated a STOVL carrier with JSF. It was only after the SDR that they realized that a practical JSF carrier was plenty big enough for CATOBAR.
And JSF itself would never have happened had the Marines and UKG not driven the development of STOVL. A different, USN/USAF-dominated aircraft might have emerged eventually, but it was the vision of the tri-service jet based on ASTOVL around which JSF came together.
So even if Dave-B ends up as a museum curiosity, we would not be talking about UK carriers at all had it never existed.