well 1) i'm not saying it's better, just that the concept of an attached lid is not even remotely new and thus complaining about it is incredibly dumb, and 2) you wouldn't recycle a bottle like that, you'd clean it up and just reuse it as-is, only having to replace the cork itself as the rubber gets too old.

Even if we're for some reason melting down metal parts every time (which we don't), metal is energy intensive to recycle, but it's recyclable infinitely. Plastic is easier to melt, but only a small percentage of it is recyclable at all, and even that is only once. So all the plastic either gets burnt, or thrown out and ends up somewhere where it shouldn't, like an ocean. Both cases are way worse.

Ideally these bottles are recycled by just reusing them for a new product, not melted down. I've used these bottles several times over for beer. There's no need to replace them.

That depends on the design. The most common one I encounter is fixed at two points and can't be extended without some amount of tearing, so I just keep tearing. I've never been the sort to not put the cap back on the bottle when throwing it away so it's a redundant feature for me.

That said, in the time since this new norm came in, I've lived in two different countries, one of which had signs saying to separate the cap from the bottle at recycling recepticles, meaning you had to tear them off.