Views can be indexed but CTE can’t. So this is one important point.
CTE work excellent on tree hierarchyi.e. recursive
Also, consider views when dealing with complex queries. Views being a physical object on database (but does not store data physically) and can be used on multiple queries, thus provide flexibility and centralized approach. CTE, on the other hand are temporary and will be created when they are used; that’s why they are called as inline view.
Update
According to your updated question, views will be the right choice. Dealing with 3.5 million rows in CTE will create extra overhead on TempDb which will eventually slow down SQL Server performance. Remember, CTE is a disposable view hence no statistics are stored and you can’t create Indexes too. It is just like a sub query.