What is the starfive-jh7110-202308-nvme-minimal-desktop.img.bz2 for?

What is your power supply ?

A quick web search for “Patriot P300 128GB watt” gives:
Power Consumption: 2.07 Watt (maximum) ¦ 0.37 Watt (idle)

And a search for VisionFive 2 (8GB RAM) gives (which I assume is with nothing attached to the USB ports, no network traffic and no NVMe connected):

Idle 1 core Half cores All cores
4 cores 7.4 W 10.4 W 11.2 W

But the official VF2 specification for the board list 18 watts as the minimum.

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.