When you have an FSMOwner with a bound graph on a GameObject that is inactive. The FSM will lose the reference to the bound graph when entering play mode.
As soon as you enable the gameobject (and thus the “Awake” of the FSMOwner component is executed), the instance of the graph will be created and everything will work normally. So nothing is lost really. It is just that the Awake functions needs to be executed for initialization.