Removing empty tags within a variable - xslt

Question

My question is related to to another poster's StackOverflow question on Two Phase Processing. I didn't want to use mode="#all" without fully understanding it and how it could affect the rest of my XSLT. I'm thinking the below code accomplishes the same thing without risking interference with other templates but would like confirmation. It kind of seems like I am processing $completepolicy twice without need to do so.
Empty tag definition: <field/> <field></field>. Tags can have attributes but there will never be an empty tag that has an attribute. There will also never be nodes with <field> </field> where the white space could represent many other things.
Given this XSLT:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<!-- many other apply-templates here -->
<xsl:variable name="completepolicy" as="element()">
<holder>
<TABLE1 type="global">
<col1>Red</col1>
<col2/>
</TABLE1>
<TABLE2>
<field1>Blue</field1>
<field2/>
</TABLE2>
</holder>
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:apply-templates mode="emptytags" select="$completepolicy/*"/>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="*[not(node())]" mode="emptytags"/>
<xsl:template match="node() | #*" mode="emptytags">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="node() | #*" mode="#current"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
Results in this output for $completepolicy:
<TABLE1 type="global">
<col1>Red</col1>
</TABLE1>
<TABLE2>
<field1>Blue</field1>
</TABLE2>

Answer 1

Why do you think the $completepolicy variable is being processed twice? This cannot be seen in the provided code.
I confirm that the provided code looks good to me.
I would recommend never to use mode="#all". This is too powerful and dangerous -- this is almost never needed.