It's a valid approach. My '56 Mercian is mostly kitted out with '70s Campag justified on those grounds (that the bike would have been ridden for twenty years, and parts replaced as they wore out). I had most of a '70s Record track group, and wanted to make the bike rideable as quickly as possible. I'm still planning a gradual upgrade to more period-correct parts though, but the budget is constrained just now.
With my '92 Stumpjumper, I set out to build the bike I wanted to ride, and it's ended up with a mixture of '90s parts from the mainstream manufacturers: Shimano, Ritchey, WTB, Syncros, Campag, Mavic and Suntour:
The thing is that it feels too modern to me now, and doesn't have the charm a '92 bike should have - 7-speed cassette, quill stem, big chainrings, cantilever brakes...
I'm even considering looking for another frame to build closer to the original.
The other question is, where do you stop? It was common to fit V-brakes to bikes that had been sold with canti's, or to upgrade the freehub body to use 8-speed cassettes, and it's a valid argument that a bike sold in '95 would probably have had V-brakes by '97. But it's a slippery slope! The same bike could have had a 9-speed cassette the following year, a 100mm fork, riser bars and disk brakes in 2002...
Not that there's anything
wrong with that...