I wanted to repost that our issue was more to do with the size of the tables. In our case the size of our queue tables were substantial, but after truncating the tables we were able to upgrade with no issues.
Our team ran into this issue and it hung after using the above patch. After looking into the update hook a bit further we compared changeField to watchdog's use of changefield and noticed a difference.
We changed
$schema->changeField('sessions', 'timestamp', 'timestamp', $new);
to
$connection->schema()->changeField('sessions', 'timestamp', 'timestamp', $new);
Attached is a patch for 10.1.6. I couldn't grab the branch that the issue was applied to, but at least our patch is here for others to bypass this problem.
unexjp → created an issue.