Installed Bitcoin Core 0.21.1 on a Ubuntu system, copied over the contents of the .bitcoin directory (including blockchain data) from another system on which I'd been running Core for years. Installed Tor, with which I've no prior experience. Started bitcoin-qt having only these parameters in ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf:
dbcache=1024
datadir=[path to .bitcoin data directory on volume different from /home volume]
debug=tor
I presumed that Core defaults to using Tor for its output.
There were a sizeable number of connections, both in and out, and my blockchain was brought up to date. The only evidence I see of Tor in debug.log is numerous periodic instances of:
tor: Error connecting to Tor control socket
tor: Not connected to Tor control port 127.0.0.1:9051, trying to reconnect
--until I closed bitcoin-qt, which generated:
tor: Thread interrupt
Shutdown: In progress...
addcon thread exit
torcontrol thread exit
In neither the "New outbound peer connected" entries in debug.log nor in the Peers window did I see anything that specifically indicated Tor to me, but then I don't know what I'm looking for. I retained the debug.log and screenshots of the Peers window for review. I can issue CLI commands if helpful.