Not for me. Finding life from elsewhere than Earth would be by far the most significant scientific discovery in human history. (Again, just a personal opinion; I have no objective argument to back it up).
I disagree, close in proximity to 'stunning', however, finding true unique life that originated on a planet by itself organically goes a long way towards proving/disproving the fermi paradox.
I think it was maybe Carl Sagan who said (something like): if we find life in our solar system it's probably game over for us, as it means the great filter is likely ahead of us, not behind us.
Though, you can take one look at the world right now, and not see how easy it would be to just destroy it if we aren't careful (and we're not being careful).
Yep, I agree with him that we're likely to find bacterial type life all over the place where there's water. At least if we can travel to places. But 'complex life' is going to be beyond scarce.
Though it's quite possible that if there is something on Venus or Mars it's Earth-origined, since conditions here 4 billion years ago look better for abiogenesis.
There is the power law heuristic, that 90% of results are often due to 10% of phenomena.
If there are several filters, then they may differ in effectiveness by many multiples, and then it's semantics as to whether you say any beyond the largest are "great".
Just FYI - no probes have ever been 100% sterilized, because it's simply impossible without destroying them. Even the most sterilized probes and rovers that we've sent to other planets will have contained at least some bacteria.
If that happened, I think we'd be able to determine that by sampling and analyzing the microbes.
I think a more interesting concept would be exchange of microbes between Venus and Earth at some point in their distant past, and then could we might be able to date that (those) event (s) via their molecular clocks (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_clock)
