Those teams from 2014 onwards were indeed excellent, and it's easy to forget how one boring 0:0 draw in the last round of the group stages in 2014-15 was the difference between greatness and the greatest disappointment.
In 2013-14 an excellent team, almost identical to the one that reached the 2015 final, was eliminated from the CL groups.
Next year we also had a very bad group stage performance and we were fighting with Olympiacos for qualification. In the last round we needed a home draw against Atletico Madrid to qualify and we did it with a boring 0:0. The rest is history.
But if we failed for a second time in the group stages, we surely wouldn't have made the 2015 CL final and I don't think that we'd have made the CL 2017 final either. I even think that a second CL failure would have forced our directors to change a lot of things and perhaps we wouldn't have won all those scudetti.
I now respect that 0:0 draw vs Atletico even more