Glass is touted as being cleaner than plastic for us and the environment. It's infinitely recyclable, unlike plastic, and it's not going to harm the environment if it's left lying around or ends up in the sea. The issues with it, in the western world, often come down to its weight and the fact that it breaks easily.
Not so long ago, we used to have milk deliveries. It was delivered in glass bottles, loaded into reusable crates and you returned the bottles so they could be cleaned and reused. Even local shops and pubs would collect back glass drink bottles which had a return deposit and they would go back to companies for cleaning and reusing. Because this was all done locally, it worked well. Today things are rarely done locally.
A couple of years ago I was reading about a South Australian milk company who tried providing their milk in glass bottles, which could be returned for cleaning. However, they were providing to supermarkets, not direct to the public, so they changed to plastic. Firstly the huge amounts of water and detergents needed to clean and disinfect them, wasn't environmentally sound, particularly in such a dry country. Then, when you're transporting glass over distance it requires vast amounts of packaging to prevent breakages, using more plastic than would be used just packing in plastic containers to start with. So the fact that we no longer do things locally has made glass much more problematic as a storage container. It's heavy and breakable. Imagine the extra weight added to that 5 litre bottle, if it came in glass.
While glass is very recyclable, recycling it only has slightly less of an environmental impact than making it from scratch. The furnaces still have to be fired up and they are high energy consumption. So reuse should really be the priority, but there is only so much you can reuse personally. Aside from cost, the reason I buy in bulk is to reduce packaging. I get honey and coconut oil in 20kg+ buckets and refill my jars from them.
The honey I purchase locally, so when I get a new bucket, I can return the old one for reuse. The rest of my bulk items come from the east coast of Australia, so they come via freight and I can't return containers for reuse. Most of the bulk plastic containers are in demand for other uses, so I can pass them on for others to use if I can't use them myself. I have more problems with reusing smaller glass containers which no-one has much use for, or they already have more than they need. These glass containers are for foods that I can't purchase in bulk and they always come wrapped in copious amounts of bubble wrap, which is how they would be delivered to shops. Then their only destination is to get carted back to an energy guzzling furnace and they still didn't escape the plastic pollution.
Until we become more localised again, packaging is going to be a struggle to minimise. Unfortunately, many western countries have outsourced most of their production, so there is a lot that we just can't get locally any more. Another reason to support local businesses instead of allowing the multinationals to monopolise everything.