Multiple tables on a page displaying only the header row when empty, developer does not want to change implementation

There is a page in a system I'm working on, that deals with user permissions regarding the current item being viewed. There are 4 groups that people can be added to. When creating a new item, you need to set up the permissions and are presented with the 4 groups, with no people added by default.

In error, I did not provide a wireframe to the developers for the null state of these tables. What has been implemented is therefore a table header row, with no data nor an empty row, I'm not sure it's even clear that there are 4 tables being shown. Table headers only I raised a fix to show a text alternative to the empty table, rather than show these weird headers. The developer has said that the adding and removing of the table would be jumpy (if the user adds then removes 1 person to the group for example) which would be jarring for the user and that it should stay as it is. The Tester agreed and closed the ticket. Empty Table Message With No Table Shown So, I thought about this some more. Maybe neither implementation is the right answer or provides the best user experience. So I came up with another 2 options. The first is to add an empty row to the table. This makes it at least slightly more obvious that there is a table, and it's empty. This suggests to the user that they could add more items. Empty Row Added to Table Second was to add an empty row to the table, with a null state message below. Empty Row Added with Null State Message I'm sure there are many versions of this question, I've read a few, but I would love to have some more opinions on what the best approach might be in this scenario, due to the multiple occurrences of the "table" on the page.

(Bit more insight: This is a bespoke piece of software created for record management and used by a team of about 50 people. Accuracy and efficiency are key. The users of this system are not super tech savvy but work in an office and use computers on a day to day basis. They tend to prefer being able to see all information at once and scroll down a page, rather than having to do lots of navigation.)

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