It might be easier to study something other than an x86 PC, at least to start with. There's so much legacy in x86 that's distracting.

This post[1] has an animated image that's pretty helpful: https://embeddedinn.xyz/images/posts/rvLinuxQemuBoot/bootAni...

It's of course specific to one platform, but the visualization of building up a structures in memory with the right offsets/order and jumping in is pretty typical.

[1] https://embeddedinn.xyz/articles/tutorial/RISCV-Uncovering-t...