Decades ago the only modern disposable gloves like these were "natural" latex which served medical professionals well but were miserably inadequate for chemical use. So nobody even thought about using them with aggressive industrial materials.

Nitrile emerged only as a specialty alternative to some of the earlier synthetic chemical-resistant compounds.

They were not disposable, more expensive than the earlier synthetic compounds, also not as thick a glove was needed so they gave you protection that was never available from anything but a much more clumsy alternative. Not nearly as tactile as the disposables though, that is their big redeeming feature.

One of the major weak points of nitrile is acetone, and things like MEK or ethyl acetate, which will soak into the polymer, swell, and weaken it. If you don't let them get too weak and shred them, they will shrink back after they dry out and are still fairly OK after that But nitrile is much better against most other solvents, acids, and alkalis though. Chlorinated solvents can be kind of rough too.

I was often the first one to use nitrile in some facilities, these ended up taking over and were the typical turquoise non-disposable ones that go about halfway up the forearm. Not the skin-tight "student models" that so many people use today. Now available in various colors :)

But these early "green" gloves alone were the same ones contributing to the stereotypical look of an environmental worker, where they can be even more scary when they sometimes add a complete tyvek suit with boots, hood, respirator, and the gloves with rubber bands around the sleeves, sampling the river water while you are fishing downstream :(

The ones like we used are $16 a pair now and were never cheap enough to be disposable. They actually last many months though. Only one other old guy uses them when I go back to my old lab, everyone else was "trained" on disposables now, each lab has a wall-mounted dispenser of various sizes like they have in hospitals. The "cost savings" are so well-realized so long ago that nobody knows it's completely false :\ People go through them like water, and it's still a shitshow when they try not to.

It's really worse from a contamination standpoint because people will still wear them for an hour or two during various chemical-handling events, but also do a little paperwork or keyboard typing with the gloves on, plus doorknobs and cabinet handles they are touching are much riskier than it used to be when disposables were not an option. Just because it's such a drag to peel them off and put on a new pair 10 minutes later.

Before disposables arrived, we used to have slightly oversized non-disposables, and throw them on & off & on many times per day, I still do. Plus I often wash the gloves while wearing them not much differently than washing my bare hands, mainly to get rid of chemicals using (very) hot soap & water or even using other strong solvents like heptane to rinse off heavier chemicals and oils. Probably about as particle-free as you can get except for what is floating around in the ambient air. Not like the skin-tight almost too-thin gloves people settle for now where they need to be peeled back off inside-out and thrown away each time.

By this point in the 21st century there are dedicated representatives of the glove manufacturers making high-touch sales calls, so there have got to be some bonuses that didn't exist that many decades ago.