Jared Poche looks for differences:
In my most recent blog post, I looked at the Query Variation report, which compares the recent performance of queries versus their historical performance to either highlight improvements or regressions in performance. The Waits Variation component does the same, but comparing the recent waits for a query to its historical waits.
One thing to keep in mind, is that if a given query is changed in any way (to change the filter, return additional columns, or include a hint), the changed query will have a different query_id in Query Store. In which case, both the Waits Variation and Query Variation procedures will not compare the historical performance of the old query to the recent performance of the new one.
Read on to see how.