It looks like MLIR is using the more modern CMAKE_LIBRARY_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY, but AddLLVM still uses this older LLVM specific alias.
In the specific case I was running into, the empty variable was causing -Wl,-rpath-link, on the command line, causing the following argument to be swallowed. This was maddening, because the following argument was the .o file containing main and I was getting main undefined errors when it was clearly there. This is egregious enough that I chose to guard it.