Normally AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS will take care of recompiling plans if statistics changing significantly. I usually have the opposite problem with a good plan

Normally AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS will take care of recompiling plans if statistics changing significantly. I usually have the opposite problem with a good plan changing to a bad one due to statistics changing at some random time in production, which seems to be a common problem in PG as well and why everyone want hints. I prefer hinting for critical problematic queries that tend to have unstable plans due to statistics changes, but you can also lock a plan in SQL server to force a specific plan, another useful feature to prevent production db instability.