I don't have a first version visionfive2 myself, but i heard good things about it and the eco-system sounds like it's growing. There are still rough edges. Lets hope they ship soon (tm)
Edit: What I currently have for my personal projects is a PolarFire SoC Discovery Kit. That's a quad-core RISC-V system with FPGA embedded. Maybe too expensive and not for everyone (130 bucks, fun fact: The dev board is cheaper than the chip itself).
Also the microchip documentation, toolchain and so forth feel really crappy and old, but once you get used to it, it's not that bad and actually getting to run bare-metal risc-v code is easy. There are easy examples for linux and bare-metal
Maybe just run an emulator on your x86/apple, for now? It'll probably be faster than actual hardware, and it will for sure be faster to develop a kernel with.