Yes thats how it works for me with bash and ksh(mksh) but with zsh esc -v does not launch $EDITOR but just puts me in visual mode inside of whatever it uses for readline.

I even tried setting editor to something other then vi(scite) and it's clear that where bash and korn lauched $EDITOR on <Esc><v> zsh does not.

My .zsh file on macOS is literally just "set -o vi"

I guess there is some kind of added magic here(are you using the oh-my-ssh macro's) that's just not applied with my deliberately minimalist .zshrc.