Okay, no. I'm all for discussing the efficacy of psychological treatments, and any post that discusses how they can help people. But there is a lot of your post that is total wrong, and totally misleading, and absolutely ill-informed.
You try to claim that CBT is short-term, lacks depth, and is low cost enough that people get told to do it for nefarious reasons across the board. On all counts those claims are utterly false. I'm going to have to break your post down into digestible pieces to make my points.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is just one of many types of therapies.
While this isn't entirely incorrect, it isn't correct either. There are two main schools of psychological treatment. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy. Both of these are fairly similar, though the latter has some methodological differences that are better suited to treating illnesses like Borderline Personality Disorder. If you want to know why, or more about it, google-fu is your friend. While there are other therapies, most of them are derivative of CBT, or use CBT in combination with another method.
CBT is not in-depth, is short-term, and is pushed because it's cheap.
Total bullshit on this front. CBT is a malleable psychological treatment that can be broad or focused, it can be general or it can be targeted. For example, someone suffering from depression will receive CBT in a general sense, where they will learn to recognise mood instability, techniques to stabilise their mood and bring them out of depression, techniques to better handle anxiety, and generally just work through the negative feelings produced by the illness and what might be causing it. More targeted CBT, like trauma-focused treatment, is much more in-depth and works through many of the components of the trauma, in an effort to re-connect a person with the event in a productive and meaningful way, to help them come to terms with it, and so on.
Some people will only engage in CBT a few times a year, or for a period of time while they are depressed - which is exceptionally common. But just about every person in treatment for a long-term mental illness will engage with long-term CBT that at times will be targeted toward a specific issue they are facing (like the experience of trauma) and other times be more general (like trying to manage mood instability in people with Schizophrenia or Bipolar Disorder).
On the point of cost and motivations to push it. This total nonsense. I can understand why you might think that as a U.S. citizen, but elsewhere in the world where medicine isn't dealt out only to the people who can afford it, this is anything but the case. CBT is effective, that is why it is pushed. And like I said in the first bit, it is at the very core of most, if not all, psychological treatment.
Final thought.
Look I get it, if you're upset with treatment options that's fine. But make sure you are upset for the right reasons and actually know what you're talking about. The fact that OP thinks that CBT is neither in-depth, nor long-term is proof that they absolutely haven't got a clue. And from their post, the only evidence to support their claims they offer is "I did a CBT workbook years ago."
CBT is a broad church of techniques and methods. It can be as simple as "just having someone to listen to you" or as in-depth as focused trauma therapy that helps you piece together events, repair your memory, unlearn your panic responses and overcome the illness entirely. It can last a few weeks to several years. And it to repeat myself, it is at the very core of just about every psychological treatment that is practiced today.
OP, I sincerely hope you pull your head out of your behind and apologise for misleading people.