Is "The empty set is a subset of any set" a convention?

There’s no conflict: you’ve misinterpreted the second highlighted statement. What it actually says is that $\varnothing$ and $A$ have no element in common, i.e., that $\varnothing\cap A=\varnothing$. This is not the same as saying that $\varnothing$ is not a subset of $A$, so it does not conflict with the fact that $\varnothing\subseteq A$.

To expand on that a little, the statement $B\nsubseteq A$ does not say that if $x\in B$, then $x\notin A$; it says that there is at least one $x\in B$ that is not in $A$. This is certainly not true if $B=\varnothing$.

From Halmos's Naive Set Theory:

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A transcription:

The empty set is a subset of every set, or, in other words, $\emptyset \subset A$ for every $A$. To establish this, we might argue as follows. It is to be proved that every element in $\emptyset$ belongs to $A$; since there are no elements in $\emptyset$, the condition is automatically fulfilled. The reasoning is correct but perhaps unsatisfying. Since it is a typical example of a frequent phenomenon, a condition holding in the "vacuous" sense, a word of advice to the inexperienced reader might be in order. To prove that something is true about the empty set, prove that it cannot be false. How, for instance, could it be false that $\emptyset \subset A$? It could be false only if $\emptyset$ had an element that did not belong to $A$. Since $\emptyset$ has no elements at all, this is absurd. Conclusion: $\emptyset \subset A$ is not false, and therefore $\emptyset \subset A$ for every $A$.

What confused me was that, the following expression was also a vacuous truth.

For every object of $x$, if $x$ belongs to the empty set, then $x$ doesn't belong to the set $A$.

As a complement (heh) to Brian Scott's (+1) answer, your argument shows that $\varnothing \subset A^{c}$, the complement of $A$. This statement is also (vacuously) true.