That unless the user requested an output object (--lto-obj-path), the an unused empty combined module is not emitted.
This changed is helpful for some target (ex. RISCV-V) which encoded the ABI info in IR module flags (target-abi). Empty unused module has no ABI info so the linker would get the linking error during merging incompatible ABIs. target-abi had discussed in http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2020-January/138151.html.
Use either lld or lld-link