Sorry I haven't actually read the original article so this is a bit of a driveby.
But, I'm skeptical of this? Surely whichever cloud platform first offers RISC-V compute, the next cloud platforms will ship a CPU that's compatible. Probably they'll be RFTing the same CPU vendors and they won't need to coordinate explicitly for this to happen. Then everyone else building RISC-V servers will essentially be forced to align on the "AWS variant" or whatever.
So yes you'll need a -cloud build of the distro you use but most people are already doing that and the cloud platforms are already providing the infra for distros to ship it (I assume they are also contributing to the -cloud distro builds directly).
RISC-V laptops and phones I could see this being an issue but for server compute it feels like there's gonna be a Schelling point.
(Actually, for phones can't Google just fix this by fiat?)