No I believe there is some misunderstandings here.
The horizontal line on the AVAR (and ADEV) typically shows $\tau$ which is the "averaging time" while the OP has referred to it as the "sampling time". They will be equivalent as long as the waveform has been boxcar averaged prior to sampling. The start of the curve on the left side of the plot (smallest $\tau$) is the reciprocal of the sampling rate used as $1/T$, and typically the remaining results for all higher $\tau$ are computed by averaging those same samples over different averaging intervals, and thus the results that can be computed are at $\tau=1/T, 2/T, 3/T \ldots $.
The ADEV and AVAR plots have specific slopes for different noise processes, and these slopes are backed up with detailed mathematical calculations consistent with the statistics of noise processes in the time and frequency domain. You can find such calculations in the Handbook of Frequency Stability Analysis by Bill Riley as well as its references.
For example, when we use AVAR and ADEV to measure the frequency stability of oscillators (one popular application for the tool), a white FM process (white freq noise) will have an ADEV slope that goes down linearly on a loglog curve at $1/\sqrt{\tau}$. This is also consistent with the standard deviation of a white noise process going down at $1/\sqrt{\tau}$ when we average the white noise over a time duration equal to $\tau$.
White phase noise on the other hand has an ADEV slope that goes down at $1/\tau$. This is consistent with phase noise being the integral of frequency noise.
The relationship between ADEV and different noise statistics is often summarized on a single ADEV plot such as what I pasted below (which came from Riley's publication referenced above):
I think having them all on one plot caused some confusion for the OP. This is how a typical ADEV plot may appear as different noise processes become dominant in different averaging intervals, but it may be clearer just to consider this plot as showing all the different possible slopes on one convenient plot. It does not mean that any of them would appear at a specific averaging interval $\tau$, or for that matter at any specific absolute level of $\sigma_y(\tau)$. They do typically transition through the different regions in the order shown, but the actual $\tau$ where White FM transitions to Flicker FM (for example) can be anywhere depending on the actual stability of the waveform being processed.
ADEV and AVAR are just convenient measures of stability typically used for waveforms that are not stationary in the long term where traditional first and second order statistics could otherwise be used (oscillator phase noise and gyroscope bias instability are two common examples). So like we measure the standard deviation of a stationary random process (constant mean, constant standard deviation) and from that access how "noisy" it is, we can make the same measurement with ADEV, except in this case we need to choose a specific time interval to average the waveform over, and at that time interval we can get a metric that is equivalent to the standard deviation (it is a standard deviation of differences specifically, as explained in the first post I linked). As we change the time interval we will get different results according to the type of noise process we have (unless we have "Flicker FM" noise as the plot above shows in that case we would get the same ADEV result everywhere independent of averaging time $\tau$.).
Please refer to this other post for further details on these concepts as I show the specific computation process for ADEV.
