Empty dictionary value in SQL Table

MariaDB (10.3.24) outputs Warning messages as shown below

[Warning] Aborted connection 29 to db: 'db' user: 'root' host: 'localhost' (Got an error reading communication packets)

due to a table (configuration) containing empty dictionary value for a field of type MediumText. INSERT INTO configuration VALUES (1,'{}');

Changing the '{}' to any other value, say, [] clears the message.

I am not an SQL expert and this is legacy code. Is there a better way to initialize with an empty dictionary value? We transitioned to MariaDB from MySQL recently.

Thanks