About countif but ignore empty cells with formulas in it

I've tried different solutions from Google but none worked.

I want to extract the most frequently occurring text from a column.

I was trying the following formula but it only returns a blank cell which of course would the most frequently occurring value:

=let(range,IR8:IR,unique(filter(range,countif(range,range)=max(countif(range,range)))))

Based on the data above, the answer should be AA because it occurs twice whereas the others occur only once.

All the data comes from a separate formula.

How can I fix the formula?