Short answer, probably not. The advantage those teams had were that there were very few ninjas that could solo carry fights or those that had insane scaling (besides 6 tails naruto). Lightning main buff teams are the only ones that come to mind for me.

And to be completely honest, I hated those teams where all a player did was wait for 10 rounds. It seemed so idiotic to me that all a person had to do was just run earth main with steel body, gaara, gakido, and sailor sakura and they could basically win against anything their power. You said it yourself, the only people you lost to were whales. You probably are the reason why some F2P quit the game if you consistently ran that team for a year.

You can still run defensive style lineups, but being defensive cant be the only thing they are good at. Hybrid lineups are honestly the way to go unless you are in the top 50 of your entire space time cluster.