What you friend calls damaged may be repairable. Or it may just need one part of it fabricated if that piece of it was too far gone. You might consider looking under roll top desk hardware on the web as well.

Chances are it was a production part but not for direct retail sales in the day. So it might be hard to find. It appears to have been factory made from the marks on the pivot point rivet at least.

Also since it is basically just steel brass plated. There would not be any issue of strength in a tig weld buildup repair for example. Even the tearing out of the eye would go okay. Not impossible but in any scenario I can easily think of it should be repairable. There are usually smaller machine shops that may consider repairing or duplicating it.

No bad intent on my part. Today some people like your friend perhaps as well as many. May not know that there was a time of extensive repairs on many things. That has been offset by the throwaway society. Possibly because replacement has become cheaper. This trend has reached even cars.

Or it is not practical to repair as the information needed to do it is not available. For example on some large screen televisions today. Many brands are throwaway after the warranty period. Under warranty they just give you a new television with the remaining warranty of your old one. It is starting to become endemic.

I have a car radio with a bad output chip. The part and shipping exceed the cost of another complete radio from an auto wrecker.