QEMU is a pain to use, lots of people have built wrappers for it that can be used for kernel testing.
- At Google we wrote an internal one called go/vm-cli. It is slightly coupled with Debian, it generates an image via Debootstrap.
- At Isovalent they wrote https://github.com/cilium/little-vm-helper which is similar but has a JSON config language and also knows how to build kernels and manage Kconfigs.