Previous versions of dplyr would allow you to manipulate empty dataframes that had been constructed from empty matrices, e.g.

packageurl <- "https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/dplyr/dplyr_1.1.3.tar.gz"
install.packages(packageurl, repos=NULL, type="source")
#> Installing package into 'C:/Users/edwar/Documents/R/win-library/4.1'
#> (as 'lib' is unspecified)
packageVersion('dplyr')
#> [1] '1.1.3'
as.data.frame(matrix(nrow = 0, ncol = 0)) |> dplyr::slice(1)
#> data frame with 0 columns and 0 rows

In dplyr 1.1.4, this code causes an internal error:

packageurl <- "https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/dplyr_1.1.4.tar.gz"
install.packages(packageurl, repos=NULL, type="source")
#> Installing package into 'C:/Users/edwar/Documents/R/win-library/4.1'
#> (as 'lib' is unspecified)
packageVersion('dplyr')
#> [1] '1.1.4'
as.data.frame(matrix(nrow = 0, ncol = 0)) |> dplyr::slice(1)
#> Error: Internal error: `template` must have a `names` attribute.

Both versions are able to reliably manipulate empty dataframes that were not constructed from matrices (e.g. data.frame() |> dplyr::slice(1) works just fine).