Figured it out ... for anyone else wondering about this, both the things I was wondering about are defined in the project configuration (idf.py menuconfig), in my case, UART0 is used for the console and TIMER0 is used by freertos.

Hi, Brand new ESP32 user here . . . I have the hello-world example running on my development board, and looking now at playing with the peripherals. I note that when I do a printf, some string shows up in the terminal, note also that freertos is running in the background. This suggests that there mu...