I did this, booted from SD card with the NVME plugged in. Then running from the SD card, downloaded the NVME image, and DD’ed it to the connected NVME. From there (along with 3.5.0ish uboot etc) I could boot from NVME
During boot I would expect everything to use maximum power.
If you saw a normal login and have a prompt (login and password), but nothing you type is shown the other possibility is that the serial TX pin from the USB-to-3.3v-uart is not connected to the RX pin on the VF2. (Or, hopefully not, if the USB2uart is 5 volts instead of 3.3 volts it has probably permanently damaged the RX GPIO pin on the VF2.