WordPress is stripping the Alt tag’s quote marks from images where Alt is not set, but leaving the word ‘alt’ creating problems for ADA compliance

I tried to replicate your issue and while the dev tools show it as alt the source code shows alt="", so WordPress is not stripping the quotes, it’s just the dev tools being concise. But even if it was, they’re equivalent so alt and alt="" are the same.

As for why the dev tools display alt, it’s because the dev tools don’t display the HTML, they display the DOM