The single reason which answers all that, and the fact that it continues to persist even today, and still indirectly poisons all digital formats that have followed, is simple human greed.
mnem
I'm talking about audio quality and manageability, and you are -- conveniently to your argument -- including metadata and politics.
Yes, with the hindsight of 2021, adding 1-10KiB or so of metadata is a no-brainer.
Given the technical solutions of 1982, that would mean ASCII or worse, just look at the GSM SMS charset, it is such a worse-ness; it's almost but not quite LATRINE-1, and what would Sony say? Dutch like English has hardly any characters outside 7-bit so neither one of the inventors nor most of the readers of this thread would even start thinking of this as a problem unless beaten with an internationalisation stick. Us Nordic people look at the 7-bit world and their
Heavy Metal usage of umlauts and simply break down in a meleé of cringe and pity: "Mötley Crüe" "Tröjan")
(Creating that paragraph involved editing Wikipedia to insert "Tröjan", with references, just because.)
The thing with CD that has made it good beyond its useful life is that it is simple, well understood, open and not encumbered by stupid things like software "patents". Given that CD is alive still -- according to you -- because of greed, that might seem like a controversial statement, but look at what came after it; MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless, WMA, Real, APT-X, et c. ad inf. All festering piles of greed. Compared to those, CDDA is immaculate conception pure. Not until the arrival of Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and Opus has the music compression landscape become something else than an industrial wasteland.
So, there!