This is more of a "what-if" scenario considering the fact that no miner would want to get into the networks bad books.
Let's say AntPool decided to just constantly mine empty blocks with just a header and no transactions, allowing the mempool to fill up. We see 2 distinct features here:
This reduces their own financial gain as they ignore all the fee income they could've made.
Developers will start to identify this as a major bottleneck to consensus and implement a soft fork to punish empty block miners and remove their incentive.
Because of this, AntPool won't let the mempool fill up and will only resort to mining empty blocks when no new transactions are coming into the network. In 2015 and maybe even early 2017 this was possible on a select few days, but today, this is virtually impossible.
Given the amount of vigilance in Blockchain communities, things like this will be dealt with quite seriously. Miners will not go against consensus and network health as they rely on the health of the network to make money.
Selfish mining battles itself by killing the short term incentive with more long term benefits. This is essentially how I see it. Hope you've found this insightful @guysellars
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