What matters is seeing AWS, Azure and GCP adopting them at a scale that surpaces ARM, likewise Apple, Microsoft, Google, Samsung et al for their OSes.
Yes.
Microsoft and Google, their RISC-V efforts we already know about.
Android RISC-V port, already merged upstream, was an effort funded by by Chinese SoC vendors. Capable chips and smartphones will follow, this is an inevitability.
As for AWS, GCP and Azure (sorted them in actual order of relevance), they will definitely start offering RISC-V support at some point and then we can see whether it picks up.
But high performance server hardware is a prerequisite for this to be possible, thus my parent post.
Assuming hardware was developed alongside the specs, which didn't change much near the time of ratification, then 2-3 years need to be added for actual products. We are about to see the first wave.
We know Tenstorrent (CEO: Jim Keller) has a design they expect to release in 2024 with performance competitive with projected Zen5 (also 2024), but using less power. That's Ascalon, a design led by the same person who was M1's chief architect at Apple.
We also know SiFive, MIPS, Rivos, Ventana are each working on their own very high performance designs, and have teams full of extremely capable people who have a history of success in high performance chips. That's a lot, and that's just what we know of. There's necessarily more efforts beyond the surface, which we don't yet know about.
Ventana's Veyron might be the first to market, with server chips expected 2023H2.