internal: use empty merge commit to clean up git diff from 16.x.x (#4412)

This no-op merge commit "pretends" to take in all of the changes from the 16.x.x branch since this branch was created from the 16.4 point release. These changes were actually cherry-picked from 16.x.x separately into this branch, but this merge commit allows us to pretend that the branch was created from 16.11.

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Co-authored-by: Ivan Goncharov <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Chris Karcher <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Sten Reijers <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Artem Zakharchenko <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Gunnar Schulze <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Aaron Moat <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Jovi De Croock <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Benjie <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: enisdenjo <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Denis Badurina <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Laurin Quast <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Erik Kessler <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Benedikt Franke <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Michael Hayes <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Mike Ciesielka <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Jeff Auriemma <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Saihajpreet Singh <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: James Bellenger <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Sachin D. Shinde <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: tpoisseau <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Dimitri POSTOLOV <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Benjie <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Rabah Ali Shah <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Guspan Tanadi <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Fatih Ozdemir <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Cris Naranjo <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Shubhdeep Chhabra <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Sarah Sanders <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: roman-lakhnov <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Eddy Nguyen <[email protected]>

Author: 29 people