I have wondered about such things before. Before I read many suttas, I think I picked up the general notion of magga and phala being mind moments, but there’s not much (any?) explicit support for that in the suttas. I tend to think the eight persons are distinct stages.
Another idea that’s IMO not unreasonable is that the dhamma-follower/faith-follower stages are synonymous with the path to stream-entry. There are suttas somewhat indicative of that, but nothing that “proves” it. There was a nice past thread by @Gabriel on the issue here: https://discourse.suttacentral.net/t/faith-follower-dhamma-follower/5778