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Miners aren't forced to include transactions in their blocks even though they're incentivized by fee to do so.
The main cause for empty blocks is spy mining, as there's normally always something in the mempool! I don't see an answer on here containing 'spy mining' so here we go :)
Spy mining is when pools try to minimize time spent hashing an out of date ...
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The benefit is the coinbase reward.
Regardless of the number of transactions in a block, a well formed block will always result in the miner earning the coinbase reward. The transaction fees are simply a cherry on top.
Once a new block is found, good miners will immediately switch to mining the next block - for maximum efficiency, you might go ahead and do ...
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It seems to be best practice for an exchange to run a node itself for a coin traded there. But, is there an alternative?
Alternative is to rely on someone else as mentioned by sipa which isn't best practice although few exchanges do it and face consequences for it.
Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/hpg9j3/...
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