You get what you pay for. Comparing the price of a quality vintage lever against that of a generic basic modern lever is not valid. I have a set of vintage Dia-Compe levers similar to your picture and have found them to be functional and reliable, but no more so than the modern Tektro levers that I have on other bikes. The vintage levers do not have adjusters, but instead rely on an adjuster at either the caliper or cable hanger. The big reason they started to mount adjusters at the lever was that it was difficult to mount an adjuster on a V-brake mechanism.
One thing that you have to keep in mind is that the vintage levers are short-pull and will not work for V-brakes. The more modern levers are typically long-pull, switchable between long and short, or less functionally somewhere in between long and short (Universal???).