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Yeah, I suppose there's that element of "catering to an audience" that can really water-down an artist's work. If used right, it creates a really tight relationship between the artist and their audience, but if used only as a tool for success, it can turn the work into a parody of itself - what was once creative, genuine and revolutionary may become stale, worn-out and mainstream in that conformist careerist way which you mentioned - for the cash and the fame.
Once you've read a Stephen King book, you've really read them all - from then on it's just a different story under the same theme, so it gets boring unless you really enjoy his way of writing. I suppose, to some extent at least, that's why he's so successful - he has a very distinct identity which translates into his work, so his name has become like a brand such as Apple or Microsoft. When you think about it, it's really like that for pretty much all well-known figures of any professional background. After they make a name for themselves, people take them much more seriously, regardless of how good their current work is compared to their magnum opus - it still ends up selling much better than if they were to write from under an unknown pseudonym, since people get hooked on their identity, and not just their work.
When it comes to King, I read his books because I like his writing style and his humour - otherwise, his stories are often either very ordinary, or very exaggerated, and the only thing that stands out ends up being this sort of ambivalent morality - he puts characters in very grey areas in a lot of his books, rather than having a straightforward "good" and "bad". And every once in a while, like any other artist, he strikes another great idea, another masterpiece, and people eat it up like freshly baked bread.
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