There is nice plugin that I use as default for my hardhat setup and that is hardhat-preprocessor, so let’s install it

and depending on if you are using TS or plain JS you would add this in .js config

const { removeConsoleLog } = require("hardhat-preprocessor");

and then at start of your config file you define which networks you want to make clean and without console.log statements and import

module.exports = {
    defaultNetwork: "hardhat",
    preprocess: {
        eachLine: removeConsoleLog((hre) => hre.network.name !== "hardhat" && hre.network.name !== "localhost"),
    },

and it will remove it on compile, so you don’t have a tedious task of manually removing it.