Managing anim states

Hello all,
ive got a small question here regarding anim states.

So, lets say I have 3 types of move animations: walk/run starts, walk/run loops, walk/run stops. According to the intro tutorial to 3rd person game (the instructor used jump start, loop and land as an example) I should have these be 3 individual states.
A little later in that tutorial series he mentions anim montages for punching animaitons. I wondered if there was a way to use an anim montage instead and collapes the movement into a single animstate rather than 3.

Its just because having 3 states for the movement start,loop and end is a but cluttering the state machine. And if I have then more stuff like move crouched or crawl or in combat state that will add even more states and having them all connect with eachother will produce a rather messy graph.

Or is there a different way even? How do you guys handle that?