The way that works is that it makes the back part of a face invisible or transparent. In order to see which side of your face is the back face, you need to turn on Face orientation:
The parts that you see blue is the normal direction of your face, the ones you see in red is the back face of your face. So when you turn on Backface culling, the red parts will become transparent.
Be sure you are looking at a back face, because most of the time your mesh will have the faces pointing in the right direction, and when you turn on backface culling nothing will happen. As you say you can always flip a face direction:
