Brent Ozar is here to praise statistics auto-creation:
Let me rephrase: before you even start playing around with statistics, make sure you haven’t taken away SQL Server’s ability to do this for you.
I like to make fun of a lot of SQL Server’s built-in “auto-tuning” capabilities that do a pretty terrible job. Cost Threshold for Parallelism of 5? MAXDOP 0? Missing index hints that include every column in the table? Oooookeydokey.
But there are some things that SQL Server has been taking care of for years, and automatically creating statistics is one of ’em.
There are edge cases where statistics auto-creation isn’t the best thing, but for the great majority of cases, it is a big positive.