Indeed, back in the day the catchphrase was "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" with Reduce meaning not to ever make something in the first place, and those were considered the order of desirability for the environment.
We had some fine reuse systems in place too, f'rex the milkman brought milk to every home first thing in the morning in glass bottles, and collected the empties from yesterday to be sanitized and reused the next day. Outside of rare breakages, nothing entered landfills. Today that system's gone in favor of tons of plastic jugs.
The problem is that recycling is a more dynamic process and generates more funding and attention. It's much harder to get the public excited about how you aren't making something, and reusing usually means the customer is the one doing the reusing and they aren't going to give you money for it, hence recycling is the big funding-generator even though it's the least useful option for actually saving the environment.
Usually it's completely meaningless feelgood anyway. I worked for about ten years in a mall where we had clearly labelled recycling bins but at the end of the day all we actually did was dump the recycle bins into the normal trash dumpster. It was pure PR but we couldn't actually recycle anything.