The reason an FPGA is a more suitable platform is you can translate "physical effort of making PCBs" into "creating a design in an infinitely re-programmable platform" and change your design as needed to your hearts content.
In fact, the original design of RISC-V included a bus called 'TileLink' to enable 'Many core' arrays of RISC-V processors.
Translation: You can pare-down open-source RISC-V cores and use TileLink and emulate CM or build something more complex as you see fit since that was built into the original open-source RISC-V specs.
FPGAs are their own joy and pain for sure and it's not as "cool" to re-program a blackbox on a PCB as it might be to make your own thing, so all depends on your goals.