No. In fact in one of his recent videos Andreas talked about some of the challenges he and other Serenity developers have had getting it to run on real hardware

No. In fact in one of his recent videos Andreas talked about some of the challenges he and other Serenity developers have had getting it to run on real hardware. QEMU, it turns out, is very "forgiving" even when emulating real HW (i.e. not virtio). That can make it challenging when the code meets real clock-synchronized circuits for the first time. I do like the VM-based OS approach for hobbyist OS's, though. Unless one is specifically interested in the challenge of supporting actual hardware, I think the "QEMU first" approach is the way to go. It simplifies the otherwise-vast problem space and encourages other hobbyists to try out your system or join your development effort. My first hobby OS project (~2000) was done by repeatedly writing a floppy image to 3.5" disk and booting it on an old junk laptop I had. It was painful and since then any hobby bare metal programming that doesn't involve microcontrollers I will happily do from the comfort of my modern machine and a VM.