Cleaning and sanitizing glass bottles is how it used to worked before the lie of recycling.
They don’t want to go back to that. Removing it cut all kinds of overhead, especially labor. It cost them a lot of money to have people bring back the bottles and clean them.
Now they can dump it all on consumers and recycling plants.
They don’t care if consumers don’t clean the bottles well enough to be recycled. They don’t care that consumers often put un-recycleables in the bin, often ruining a whole batch of recyclables. They don’t care if the recycling plant can’t actually make money off the recycled material.
They got what they wanted. Their product everywhere with less responsibility for their business. They will always go with what saves them money and pushes the social responsibility onto someone else.