When a branch has no commits of its own, e.g. when it is the baseline
branch itself, git rev-list returns nothing and first_commit is empty.
The empty value was still used to build "$first_commit^", which git
rejects as a bad revision.
git-clang-format then failed without writing anything to stdout, which
the output check reads as "formatting required". Pushing the baseline
branch therefore failed the CI formatting check, reporting a style
violation that does not exist.
Report that there is nothing to format instead.
git rev-list also returns nothing when the baseline ref does not exist
as it only reports that on stderr, so verify the baseline separately to
keep that case a loud failure rather than a silent pass.
Ticket: #9097