Hm, so today was a bit of a mixed bag. While I was able to run the VM image in qemu (in emulation, not in kvm), it is really, really slow on both my PC and my M1 MacMini.
As in unusably slow. Sure, in terms of long term storage, it's probably okay as things will get faster and faster, but I want this to be usable out of the box.
Back to the drawing board.