We hit this on v13b2 and verified it fails on today's HEAD (ac25e7b039).
explain SELECT 1 FROM sites NATURAL JOIN sectors WHERE sites.config_site_name != sectors.sect_name ; ERROR: could not determine which collation to use for string comparison
I can workaround the issue by DELETEing stats for either column.
It's possible we're doing soemthing wrong and I need to revisit docs..but this was working in v12.