True, although you'll probably need a stronger anti-Imperialist league in the United States. However, there is the danger of the Philippines falling into Germany's hands, which would actually deny the US some important business deals and some other things but that may be better in the long run.
I never credit that argument, or the related suggestions they might have fallen to Japan or whoever.
That is--if only Americans lived up to their self-image as liberators, it would have been easy enough to guarantee Philippine independence by Americans negotiating with the locals for very limited concessions. What the US establishment mostly wanted out of the Philippines was a naval base. Given the role of the US Navy in securing the defeat of the Spanish, I think if we'd have asked for some land to lease for a base at Manila, we could probably get that and keep the good will of the vast majority of Filipinos. With a major US Naval base guesting on Filipino soil, I don't think any European power or Japan would think the Philippines would be an easy mark for conquest, even if the independent Filipino state proved to be very rickety and unstable. (Not saying it would, just conceding that that might have happened). The US base would be a tripwire; attacking the islands would be tantamount to attacking the USA. That might not have deterred all powers in the era but it would be something for them to think seriously about anyway, and I believe if the relationship between Washington and Manila were reasonably cordial, the US would indeed go to war to defend the Philippines from any attack.
Nothing in any of my studies has indicated to me that the islands were ever on the whole of great economic value to the USA; conceivably possessing them may have on the whole covered the costs of doing so.
I do believe that a cordial and respectful relationship with a Filipino government could have brought Americans all
net benefits that OTL were achieved by colonial conquest. And left the islands as safe, or conceivably safer, from foreign attack than their status as an American possession which we were not prepared to spend adequate funds to actually defend in full!
The problem was, we didn't trust that a bunch of brown people could create a government we could deal with without our "help." Never mind they were actually doing it long before American ground forces could arrive...
A related problem was that this was an era when European powers were scrambling to consolidate and expand all their colonial claims and Americans were simply afraid of being frozen out.
I should acknowledge that an American patron-client relationship with a nominally independent Philippines is no guarantee of amity and good cheer in the islands--that was a game we played in Latin America with often grim results for the locals. An independent Philippines under American protection might be regarded as an international joke and a de facto colony.
But it would still be legally independent, at least as much so as Cuba or Haiti was in this era, and considering how often those nations were under US military occupation, perhaps considerably more so.
It is tricky to see how and why we'd let them go between 1901 and 1940. Once we decided to subdue the place, we started wading in pretty deep in blood; it would have been hard to back out when the resistance was still strong and hot, and then afterward we wouldn't want to let them go too soon lest recent resentments lead the newly freed government to turn to our enemies as allies out of spite. One would think the Republicans of the 1920s might be open to the idea of pulling out, as an economy measure and to help return the USA to "normalcy," except that it was the icons of their own party, including factions that had fratricidally split from each other, who had all together supported the colonization effort just a couple decades before. And by then, the pacification measures were finally going well enough and profits were at last to be made in the islands not too badly offset by the high costs of violent rule. Local elites who could be relied on to do business with Americans were being cultivated. I am not sure when the planned date for independence was set for around 1940 or so but I suspect it may have been set before FDR took office. So in a sense, in the sense that the US government accepted in principle the Philippines would be eventually independent and even set a specific deadline, that decision
was made before WWII OTL! I am not sure when or by whom though.
Then of course we postponed it during the war when the place was under Japanese occupation.
If we had somehow been able to sufficiently fortify the place so the Japanese failed to take it, perhaps we'd have stuck to our self-imposed timetable and perhaps not.