Without qemu you have to implement serial interfaces early in order to debug your own OS. Qemu is a huge benefit early on, and provides a sane environment for deterministic development as opposed to potentially quirky hardware.
Usually hobbyist OS projects don't start directly on hardware. Many of them never reach the point of running on hardware.
I don't know about qemu for a PI/arm in general, but you do have to be careful on x86, because segmentation limits aren't checked by default, and you can be lulled into doing things that don't work on hardware (I messed up secondary processor starting), and if you don't frequently test on hardware, it's easy to forget things. (See also homebrew games that only work on emulators)
But, you can certainly wait to start on hardware until you've got it started on qemu. Debuggability is a lot better unless you've got specialized equipment for your hardware setup
On Arm a couple of only-on-hardware pitfalls are (a) cache maintenance -- QEMU doesn't model caches so won't notice if you forget to clean the dcache and flush the icache before executing code you just wrote or modified and (b) synchronization/barriers -- QEMU doesn't reorder memory accesses and generally makes writes to system registers take effect immediately, so won't notice if you forget necessary barrier insns.
Usually hobbyist OS projects don't start directly on hardware. Many of them never reach the point of running on hardware.