I was even lucky enough to find the mineral water book relatively early in all my A21 games til now.
With that you're done considering beverage and can spend everything you find for glue.
Atm running a 7filter farm and sitting on a very good amount of water for everything.
So if you ask me, yes, I also don't see any considerable difference with the new system. If I want plenty of water, I can still get it rather easy.
And I would be very happy if they reverted back to the glass jar system, just because it felt so much more like it should naturally be.
Significantly raising crafting time for empty jars, and/or add a "special tool" like crucible to unlock crafting them, would have had the same effect to cut down availability of big amounts of water early game.
I really can't get my head around why they considered the system so bad that they put effort into this totally different system, instead of just making easy and fast adjustments to the existing one. What was so bad about it?