It’s ridiculous, but you can wrap it in another layer of 1-element vectors to be hvcat-ed because it’s not recursive:
julia> [[Int64[1]] [Int64[]];
[Int64[]] [Int64[1]]]
2×2 Matrix{Vector{Int64}}:
[1] []
[] [1]
julia> [Int64[1] Int64[];
Int64[] Int64[1]]
ERROR: DimensionMismatch: mismatched height in block row 1 (expected 1, got 0)