To my best knowledge, RollingFileAppender in log4j2 will not roll over at the specified time (let's say - at the end of an hour), but at the first log event that arrives after the time threshold has been exceeded.
Is there a way to trigger an event, that on one hand will cause the file to roll over, and on another - will not append to the log (or will append something trivial, like an empty string)?
No there isn't any (built-in) way to do this. There are no background threads monitoring rollover time.
You could create a log4j2 plugin that implements org.apache.logging.log4j.core.appender.rolling.TriggeringPolicy (See the built-in TimeBasedTriggeringPolicy and SizeBasedTriggeringPolicy classes for sample code.)
If you configure your custom triggering policy, log4j2 will check for every log event whether it should trigger a rollover (so take care when implementing the isTriggeringEvent method to avoid impacting performance). Note that for your custom plugin to be picked up, you need to specify the package of your class in the packages attribute of the Configuration element of your log4j2.xml file.
Finally, if this works well for you and you think your solution may be useful to others too, consider contributing your custom triggering policy back to the log4j2 code base.