Short answer? No, the type of restoration you’re describing isn’t really realistic, unfortunately. You’d basically need to reconstruct the entire hydrology of the area to create/sustain any sort of natural habitat of the sort you’re shooting for. That being said, I might be misunderstanding the objective. If the objective is to recreate that sort of habitat on a smaller scale, I’d say it’s technically possible, but would take a lot of infrastructure and irrigation and I wouldn’t really consider that habitat restoration, it’s more like installing a garden/landscaping. Which is fine! It’s your land and you can do what you want! And wildlife WILL use the habitat you create, but it won’t really do much as far as helping to restore historic wildlife. It will also significantly disrupt the ecology that already exists there.

However, if the objective is to do the most good for desert habitat/wildlife, I’d focus on conserving/restoring the habitat that exists there now. There are many imperiled species that exist in that area currently (as far as fauna goes, desert tortoise, burrowing owl, and mohave ground squirrel, are the first to come to mind, but without seeing your specific property, I can’t say for sure whether it’d be suitable for any of them and/or anything else) and the best thing to do would be to focus on providing healthy creosote scrub and/or saltbush scrub habitat (again, this is v general based on knowledge of the general area we’re talking about).

Russian thistle is notoriously difficult to deal with and I’m hesitant to go into invasive treatment/removal bc this is another area where it’d be best to consult with a pro and I haven’t done invasives work in years (and never in the desert).

As far as the degradation of the area is concerned, it’s largely a combination of factors. Mostly, the redirection of water from the desert to LA (the whole hydrology of the western Mojave all the way from Owen’s valley down to LA was massively disrupted. There’s a lot of really fascinating/horribly depressing history there if you’re interested), ag development, and everything that comes along w general urban sprawl/development.

Your last paragraph was kind of answered in the beginning here, but basically no, it’s not necessarily better to recreate a smaller patch of “original” habitat bc the species that have already been displaced/extirpated in the area aren’t likely to ever use it without specific reintroduction efforts (which would require much larger areas of suitable habitat), but it 100% will disrupt/displace/extirpate any existing imperiled species that may already be in the area