Vivaldi team does not respond to any comments asking about ongoing v2 manifest support; safe to assume it's gone as soon as it's out of Chromium upstream. Given Tetzchner's continual messaging on how important user privacy is to Vivaldi it seems like a strange decision, but I don't know how much effort would be required to maintain the support. They're a small team, so it would be understandable if they would just say it's too hard, but instead they have avoided the topic entirely, which suggests they agree with the direction.
Or they just don't want to admit publicly that they're too small to maintain a fork when it diverges this much