There are other ways to achieve that (optimizer features and decisions can be influenced by config settings, or by altering entries in statistics tables), but i

There are other ways to achieve that (optimizer features and decisions can be influenced by config settings, or by altering entries in statistics tables), but it's admittedly quite clunky. I agree that a production incident at 3am is definitely not the right time to start grokking these settings. The extension can be a good remedy for such cases.