Grant Fritchey explains a second-order effect of Query Store:
I may have occasionally talked about the importance of Query Store, but today I want to emphasize just how much Microsoft is weaponizing query store.
Of course, I don’t mean they’re creating the Death Star or something, I simply mean they’re taking the information that Query Store gathers and using that to enable a number of new performance enhancements within SQL Server.
Grant shows several examples of how SQL Server can take data in Query Store and use it to make queries in that database faster. It took a few versions of SQL Server but we’re getting to see some of the long-run promise of the feature, now that most of the bugs have been ironed out and the SQL Server development team has had enough time to implement this functionality.