Definitely not until the animator works. Annoyingly I have at least a half dozen times set up an animator only to have it not work. But then if I delete the transitions and recreate them, lo and behold they work! It’s never repeatable so I’ve never filed a bug.
But also keep in mind that a trigger would only fire ONCE, whereas the trueness or falseness of a boolean is every frame, so right away if something else is undoing a state, a trigger or bool would behave differently.
One other thing to do is copy the Animator and start damaging it by removing other parts that might contain competing state changes, until it works.
Here’s my general cribsheet:
Anything with Animations / Animators / Mechanim:
Only consider the code AFTER you have done this critical step:
Always start with the Animator state machine and prove it works in isolation, no code at all.
Here’s more reading on how to do that: