The text of the amendment is not tautological in itself: nowhere else in the constitution is it made clear whether the enumerated powers are a mere sampling of the federal government's authorities or an exhaustive list of them. So the Tenth Amendment is broadly understood to have codified the doctrine of enumerated powers—that is, the idea expressed by Madison in Federalist 45, that the enumerated powers are in fact meant to be taken as an exhaustive list.
That's why the Tenth Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights, as is quite clear from the historical record of the drafting and ratifying process. (This is not controversial, as I imagine you know.) But the meaning of the Tenth Amendment and the practical extent of the enumerated powers doctrine was nevertheless a muddle from the start, owing partly to the tension with the necessary-and-proper clause.
No one was at all sure what it took to justify a specific federal action under one of the enumerated powers. The issuance of passports is not on the list of enumerated powers, but the wartime Department of Foreign Affairs (renamed the Department of State in September 1789) was carried over into the constitutional era, issuing passports all the while. The power to annex territory—also absent from the list; but Jefferson decided that he could purchase Florida and Louisiana. And so on and so forth.
Still, there were indeed rare moments in the the nineteenth century when judges invoked the Tenth to nullify acts of Congress, as in Collector v. Day, 78 U.S. (11 Wall.) 113 (1871), which stood until 1939. It is easy to imagine that the amendment was rarely invoked before the progressive era mostly because the doctrine of enumerated powers was firmly established; the powers of the federal government were, in actual practice, vastly less in those days. The Tenth Amendment has been even more rarely invoked since the early decades of the twentieth century because progressive judges completely eviscerated it.
The Tenth Amendment means essentially nothing today, you're right, but that has not always been the case, and it's not because the words themselves are meaningless.