The intervening decades have produced a more nuanced critical apparatus for pop music, one that can recognize production craft as genuine craft, that can evaluate the specific qualities of a voice as independent of the compositional origin of the song that voice is singing, that can assess the emotional effectiveness of a pop song without requiring that it also demonstrate the auteur qualities associated with rock. In this revised vocabulary, “Never Gonna Give You Up” looks different — not as the product of a cynical commercial formula but as the product of skilled craftspeople who understood exactly what they were making and who had the good fortune to choose a voice that was genuinely extraordinary for the vehicle they had built.
The voice that Pete Waterman heard in Warrington in 1985 was the asset. Everything else — the production, the arrangement, the promotion, the videos, the chart positions — was the infrastructure built around that asset. The asset is still there. When you click the link and the video begins and the voice comes in, the reason the joke has resonance rather than merely incongruity is that the thing at the center of it is real: a real voice, making a real sound, forty years after it was recorded in a studio in South London, still doing what Waterman heard it do that night in Lancashire.
The meme found something worth finding. That is the part the story tends to bury under the statistics and the cultural history. The billion views are the evidence of the finding. What was found is the voice.