My httpd.conf is empty

It's empty by default. You'll find a bunch of settings in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf.

In there it does this:

# Include all the user configurations:
Include httpd.conf

It seems to me, that it is by design that this file is empty.

A similar question has been asked here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2567432/ubuntu-apache-httpd-conf-or-apache2-conf

So, you should have a look for /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

The /etc/apache2/httpd.conf is empty in Ubuntu, because the Apache configuration resides in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf!

“httpd.conf is for user options.” No it isn't, it's there for historic reasons.

Using Apache server, all user options should go into a new *.conf-file inside /etc/apache2/conf.d/. This method should be "update-safe", as httpd.conf or apache2.conf may get overwritten on the next server update.

Inside /etc/apache2/apache2.conf, you will find the following line, which includes those files:

# Include generic snippets of statements
Include conf.d/

As of Apache 2.4+ the user configuration directory is /etc/apache2/conf-available/. Use a2enconf FILENAME_WITHOUT_SUFFIX to enable the new configuration file or manually create a symlink in /etc/apache2/conf-enabled/. Be aware that as of Apache 2.4 the configuration files must have the suffix .conf (e.g. conf-available/my-settings.conf);

OK - what you're missing is that its designed to be more industrial and serve many sites, so the config you want is probably:

/etc/apache2/sites-available/default

which on my system is linked to from /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/

if you want to have different sites with different options, copy the file and then change those...