When writing a database query, there are use cases when, based on various conditions, the query needs to be "nullified" in order to return an empty result. This could be accomplished by adding a condition that always evaluates to FALSE (for example 1 <> 1).
However, this condition could be added to a query in two ways:
1) using ->where('1 <> 1')
2) using ->condition('1 <> 1')
The second example is incorrect and not supported by Drupal's database abstraction layer, because the $field argument of the condition() method should not be an expression.
To prevent incorrect usages like the one above, a new alwaysFalse() helper method has been added to \Drupal\Core\Database\Query\ConditionInterface.
Code example:
\Drupal::database()->select('example_table', 'et')
->fields('et', ['name'])
->condition('example_column', 27)
->alwaysFalse()
->execute()->fetchCol();