Ok, simple testing complete. Active pause will not stop failures from triggering, whereas esc pause does. That suggests tay esc pause does indeed stop the code from executing, but of course does continue to allow the passage of time. It even automatically turns off active pause, which means my workaround doesn't work. Still, good to know where we are!
Edit: but wait, if one manually locks time with the flow widget, then it will stay locked during an escape pause! So true pause does seem to be available with msfs2024. A bit annoying that you need a piece of (paid) third party software to do it, but it does seem to work.