No. Depends on what sort of end state one is considering
I've been reading a lot of timelines in this forum even before I joined. One of the most common trends I saw in them is that the Philippines is always being passed on from one colonial power to another (with a lot of people being slaughtered in the process). There are other scenarios where the Philippines gets nuked for being an American puppet/ally, or being balkanized, among other bad things. With this in mind, I thought. Is the Philippines really destined to be screwed in almost every alternate timelines, at least theoretically?
No. Depends on what sort of end state one is considering as "unscrewed" but even given Philippine history as it was through the Eighteenth Century, independence in the Ninteenth Century (early, in line with the independence movements in Spanish America, or late, with a sucessful Filipine Revolution against that Spanish in parallel with the S-A War) are both possibilities.
A "Dominion" type autonomous status within a Spanish Empire-turned-Commonwealth analogue is also possible, although more challenging for obvious reasons.
A US Commonwealth without the P-A war is also a possibility, but challenging.
It's possible things get worse, of course; a prolonged occupation/exploitation by Imperial Japan beginning in the Nineteenth Century is certainly possible; the Western Pacific is a challenging arena, throughout the modern era, and, presumably, long before then.
The great powers - Asian and otherwise - are always going to be eyeing the archipelago for its strategic location and resources.
Best,