I'm assuming it's just a noop but I'm curious in the engine if this is just conditioned off or if it still gets executed but it's not visible?
It depends on the environment. In an environments that adhere to the console specification, then:
If the console is not open when the printer operation is called, implementations should buffer messages to show them in the future up to an implementation-chosen limit (typically on the order of at least 100).
Some environments don't adhere to that specification (notably very obsolete versions of Internet Explorer [IE8 didn't even define the console object if the devtools weren't open(!)]), but by and large that's how it works in even vaguely modern environments.