Is the change supposed to eliminate glass production at the beginning of the game from regular furnace?
It looks like the only way to make glass or glassware early on is through molten glass process.
This puts a big resource need for fueling glassworks.

The beginning of the game really sucks now. You need a lot of raw coal processing to get enough tar & coal gas to just barely fuel your glassworks needs for glass, glassworks & empty petri dishes. Can't make any hot air either to make that go quicker until you research coal processing 1, and with that you still need to get 10 bricks wasted for a bit of hot air.
I think the recent changes made the beginning game a lot worse and were unnecessary. At least allow basic glass making in stone furnace with lower ratio.

New patch to PyCoal reduced glassworks tier 1 usage to 10MW, giving you about 3x more glass for the same amount of power in the early game. This should help significantly.