Does an UPDATE become an implied INSERT

Yes, for Cassandra UPDATE is synonymous with INSERT, as explained in the CQL documentation where it says the following about UPDATE:

Note that unlike in SQL, UPDATE does not check the prior existence of the row: the row is created if none existed before, and updated otherwise. Furthermore, there is no mean to know which of creation or update happened. In fact, the semantic of INSERT and UPDATE are identical.

For the semantics to be different, Cassandra would need to do a read to know if the row already exists. Cassandra is write optimized, so you can always assume it doesn’t do a read before write on any write operation. The only exception is counters (unless replicate_on_write = false), in which case replication on increment involves a read.