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Reading half of it I'm struggling to see why they chose the semantic 'false?'. How do you read it? It sounds like a question, why not just 'false'?

AFAICT: Just "false" would be a regular boolean value. The question mark turns it into a logic value so it can be used in conditionals.

But there are no bools in Verse so seems the keyword isn't taken and could have just been syntactic sugar for 0 from what I can tell?

There are no bools in Verse conditionals. That doesn't mean that there are no bools in the language at all.