In the early days of the pack.png search, we figured building the re-creation would be best done on an older version. Later we realized that with a texture pack and some minor tweaks to the rendering code, it was much easier to use 1.16.5.
But before that, we used Beta 1.7.3. I dug up an old Bukkit jar and threw together this plugin. Back then, Essentials had a /tppos command, but it was limited to integers. For recreating the exact camera angle, we needed decimal precision. This simple plugin added that capability.