Did Google Changed the Way it Indexes External Links on NoIndex, Follow Page?

Hi,
Couple of years ago Google was following, crawling, indexing external links on pages having meta robtos tag: noindex, follow.

example my PBN page: example.com/cars.html having meta robots tag noindex, follow,
having an external link to my money site with anchor text Cars.

But now it seems Google bot does not crawls and indexes backlinks to external sites.

I recently added such noindex, follow page and added a made-up-word to check if that backlinks get count?
Googlebot visited that page, but did not crawled/indexed the backlink and its anchor text.

what's your experience??

Made up word might be the reason it's ignored.

How do actually confirm the external link on the page is counted?