Blizzard restored items like this and the npcs that give the quest for sure gave you a replacement in WotLK times.
A fair assumption is that Blizzard added the npc restoration at some point in order to not having to do it manually all the time. But finding a source to confirm if this was before or after 2.0 will likely be hard.
I seem to remember a situation with a guildmember restoring the necklace in Vanilla but its such a minor thing that my memory could easily be playing tricks on me.
Small stuff like this normally didn't make it into patchnotes so that is probably a dead end and the wayback archive is neither searchable nor very complete. (And the official forums is probably the best bet for finding contemporary evidence for this and that doesn't to my knowledge exist outside of the wayback archive.)