You would expect it to do that, and I'd say that's a desirable behaviour, but it's not really that simple and you certainly don't get that for free.
Typically any of the common modern engines with a "time scale" variable like that are not at all optimising anything in that way. It's likely that the physics engine won't be stepped with a zero delta time, which will reduce the time spent on physics, but that's more of a byproduct of how physics engines work[0] than an optimisation.
You would have to go out of your way to capture the scene and display it "under the pause menu" in that way. Not saying nobody does that, just that it's not something the engine is giving you for free nor is it related to the time scale variable.
Further, doing that won't necessarily reduce resource usage. For example, if there isn't some sleep time inserted in the main loop when in a menu, or v-sync[1] to limit the framerate, the result of the simplified scene (just the menu and the quad with the captured scene) is an extremely high framerate, which may or may not cook the hardware more than the in-game load.
[0] Typical rigidbody physics engines are only (what I'll call) predictably stable with a constant delta time (same dt every tick). And a common way to manage this is with a time accumulator main loop, that only steps physics for whole units of dt.
[1] And v-sync isn't a silver bullet. consider refresh rates, different hardware, different drivers, driver overrides.
Speaking of "capturing the scene and display it under the pause menu"....
acerola on YouTube has an excellent 23 minute frame rendering analysis video about what goes into drawing just the "pause menu" in Persona 3 Reload:
https://youtu.be/dVWkPADNdJ4?t=19m10s