Bitcoin is supposed to be resistant to any attacks, otherwise it wouldn't be able to work properly and won't have any significant value. Mining empty blocks - for whatever reasons, can be considered as "transaction withholding attack", and the network has mechanisms to deal with it - since this causes fees to go higher, honest miners are getting much more profit, and are able to afford more hashpower later, thus decreasing profits of attackers even further and even putting them in loss because of increased difficulty. We shouldn't take any actions like forking, banning Antpool, etc. The system will reach new equilibrium soon.
I think you're wrong.
There is nothing Bitcoin Core can do against the empty blocks.
The attacker is Bitcoin Core by extruding the network with an artificial block limit.
Miners -with sufficient consensus- have the right and opportunity to create fully valid empty blocks, which can not be revoked, nor is it useful to ban IPs from some nodes.
It seems a lie that suddenly so many people do not understand the fundamentals of Bitcoin.