trying to print to command line in puppeteer from within page.evaluate

I am very new to puppeteer. I have a puppeteer script (node v20.15.0) and I’m trying to write/print to the command line from inside a page.evaluate that’s inside an async function. I was following this example:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/61336937/1827764

If I run that code, it works perfectly. I can even modify it to pass a variable like this:

await page.exposeFunction("myFunc", (value) => console.log(value));
await page.evaluate(async () => {
    await myFunc('test');
       return true;
});

However, I have something like this:

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');
const fs = require('fs'); //filesystem functions
const path = require('path'); //path-related functions
const https = require('https')

process.on('uncaughtException', function (exception) {
  console.log(exception); 
});

(async () => {
    var browser;

    var puppeteer_options = {
        headless: true, 
        ignoreHTTPSErrors: true, 
        args: ['--no-sandbox', '--disable-setuid-sandbox', '--single-process', '--no-zygote', '--disable-dev-shm-usage', '--shm-size=4gb', ], 
        defaultViewport: {width: 1920, height: 1080},
        protocolTimeout: 1000000, //https://www.puppeteersharp.com/api/PuppeteerSharp.LaunchOptions.html
    }

    browser = await puppeteer.launch(puppeteer_options);

    var page = await browser.newPage();
    
    await page.exposeFunction("logInNodeJs", (value) => console.log(value));

    var gp_args = {}
    gp_args['x_data'] = {}
    if(gp_args['x_data'])
    {
        var x = await get_x({x_data: gp_args['x_data'], gp_args:gp_args})
    }

    async function get_x(options)
    {
        var url = '<url>'

        await page.setDefaultNavigationTimeout(0)

        await page.goto(url, {waitUntil: 'networkidle2'});

        gp_args['waitforselector'] = "div[class='paging']"
        gp_args['waitforselector_timeout'] = 30000

        try
        {

            await page.waitForSelector(gp_args['waitforselector'], {visible: true, timeout: gp_args['waitforselector_timeout'] })

        }
        catch(err)
        {
            console.log(err)
            return
        }
    
        var el = await page.evaluate(async () => {
            await logInNodeJs('test 1')
        
            var el = document.querySelector("div[class='paging']")
        
            pages = el.querySelectorAll('a')
            return pages.length - 1
        })
        
        console.log(el)
    }
})()

In this example, when the “await logInNodeJs(‘test 1’)” runs, the only output I get is:

[

just a left bracket. I don’t know why it isn’t printing out ‘test 1’, and I don’t know where the “[” is coming from.