Dimitri Furman announces a change in Azure SQL Database:
In Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance, the background process that updates statistics asynchronously can now wait for the schema modification lock on a low priority queue. This improves concurrency for workloads with frequent query plan (re)compilations.
New behavior is enabled with the ASYNC_STATS_UPDATE_WAIT_AT_LOW_PRIORITY database-scoped configuration. This feature is currently in public preview.
Dimitri does a good job of explaining what this means and how it can make life a little better for people querying tables with statistics updates.