Going back in the Blockchain past and re-creating lost wallet private keys

Hello !

My father and I (both computer engineers but with no notable education on the blockchain tech and no usual interest in Blockchain / Bitcoin stuff) were having a discussion about an idea he had:

• Get your hands on the Bitcoin Blockchain and wind the clocks all the way back to the early days of Bitcoin when the total processing power involved in "progressing" the blockchain was still low.

• Somehow find evidence of wallets that were created and then "lost" (lost hardware that stored the keys), and "restore" the blockchain state to exactly just before the moment they were created.

• Reprocess the wallet creation operation and effectively obtain the same public & private keys as back then assuming you can reconstitute all the necessary conditions for whatever random number generation algorithm that was used to output the same result again.

• You now have the public & private keys of a "lost wallet" you can empty into your own.

The idea seemed simple and dumb enough to me that I assumed two things:

• He's probably not the first to have this idea

• Neither of us is educated enough about the topic to come to an actual conclusion

To me, it seems it's very likely that accurately "winding the clocks back" to the exact right place in the blockchain, and reconstituting the exact conditions that were in place when the keys were generated would simply be too complex to be worthwhile, if not virtually impossible. Yet, he's convinced that in all likelyhood, if you went all the way back to for example the early / mid 2000s, there couldn't be anything so complex that a modern machine with many times the processing power couldn't do.

So I'm asking here, because none of the (admittedly cursory) research I did yielded any satisfying answer. What do you think about this idea ? Is there some obvious thing we missed ?