Raul Gonzalez gives some tips on optimizing statistics updates:
For now, everything described might not be such a horrible thing, it’s clear that SQL Server will not take full advantage of the stats on the column [Body] if the queries we are running use wildcards (specially leading), but why so much fuss? Well, now it’s when things start making sense (or not).
Running stats maintenance on this kind of columns every night can become really expensive and this is what I’ve found more than once when using the Query Store to look for queries that have a high number of reads.
Read the whole thing.