Here are cropped out shots from three resolutions, with a few spots having increased contrast to point out the noise.
They are "normalized", upscaled to the highest denominator resolution, for ease of comparison.

900p

1440p

2160p
At 4K, the AO produces "pixel-perfect" noise.
I thought this was caused by my abuse of volumetrics, or some of my lights having very high shadowFilterSize values, but it turned out to just be AO. Though it DOES happen with volumetrics, but not to the same extent.
(I was gonna see if I could maybe render at 5K and then downsample to smooth out the noise a bit, but it turns out the max width is 4096.)
They are "normalized", upscaled to the highest denominator resolution, for ease of comparison.

900p

1440p

2160p
At 4K, the AO produces "pixel-perfect" noise.
I thought this was caused by my abuse of volumetrics, or some of my lights having very high shadowFilterSize values, but it turned out to just be AO. Though it DOES happen with volumetrics, but not to the same extent.
(I was gonna see if I could maybe render at 5K and then downsample to smooth out the noise a bit, but it turns out the max width is 4096.)