[dzaima]

You don't need to write a new loop every time a new vector size drops, but over time you'll still get more and more cases of wanting to write multiple copies of loops to take advantage of new instructions; there are already a good bunch of extensions of RVV (e.g. Zvbb has a good couple that are encounterable in general-purpose code), and many more to come (e.g. if we ever get vrgathers that don't scale quadratically with LMUL, some mask ops, and who knows what else will be understood as obviously-good-to-have in the future).

This kinda (though admittedly not entirely) balances out the x86 problem - sure, you have to write a new loop to take advantage of wider vector registers, but you often want to do that anyway - on SSE→AVX(2) you get to take advantage of non-destructive ops, all inline loads being unaligned, and a couple new nice instrs; on AVX2→AVX512 you get a ton of masking stuff, non-awful blends, among others.

RVV gets an advantage here largely due to just simply being a newer ISA, at a time where it is actually reasonably possible for even baseline hardware to support expensive compute instrs, complex shuffles, all unaligned mem ops (..though, actually, with RISC-V/RVV not mandating unaligned support (and allowing it to be extremely-slow even when supported) this is another thing you may want to write multiple loops for), and whatnot; whereas x86 SSE2 had to work on whatever could exist 20 years ago, and as such made respective compromises.

In some edge-cases the x86 approach can even be better - if you have some code that benefits from having different versions depending on hardware vector size (e.g. needs to use vrgather, or processes some fixed-size data that'd be really bad to write in a scalable way), on RVV you may end up needing to write a loop for each combination of VLEN and extension-set (i.e. a quadratic number of cases), whereas on x86 you only need to have a version of the loop for each desired extension-set.