Presumably it's more of a financial/efficiency problem. Pumping water is expensive, less reliable and a heap of maintenance nightmare compared to passive options. You'd avoid it entirely if it was feasible.
It's absolutely a financial decision, but it wasn't a financial problem. Cooling towers are not free but in the grand scheme of building a nuclear plant they're not expensive either (most power stations — including non-nuclear — have cooling towers).
And "Direct cooling" is not a passive option, you're still pumping water from and to the river or body of water in order to condense steam in the secondary circuit. What you're not doing is semi-closed cycling of that water through a cooling tower, you're feeding the condenser straight from the body of water, and sending water back into it more or less directly (possibly having gone through a radiator of some sort to shed some heat).