Alright, I tried to reproduce the issue and could not in the current live build of the game.
Puzzled, I went through some archival videos I had and found the most recent one where I could see signs of the issue (at 4k, which always had minor and tolerable texture problems). Watch the area around the letter box as my ship is coming out of the hangar (may need to view fullscreen at one of the higher resolutions for it to be clear):
[video=youtube;K4qszDmkDU4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4qszDmkDU4[/video]
Notice the single texture that is extremely slow in loading? LOD issues like that used to happen at that specific part and very rarely on some surface bases or on ship models in outfitting, at 4k textures. 8k was much worse, to the point that many textures never fully loaded and ended up looking like mud.
Either they fixed this some time in 3.x, or the fixes they made to shadows around the same time indirectly fixed the issue for me, as I was able to stop using my custom shadow settings (which doubled shadow slice/map size and added more frustums to improve shadow quality). The only other thing I can think of that might explain the difference is that I switched to using 1.99999 for LOD distance scale about six months back; it's possible this forces otherwise low priority textures to load further out, but that couldn't explain why you don't see the issue (unless you've also increased the LOD distance scale).
Anyway, I haven't seen the problem recently, but didn't attempt 8k texture resolution again until just now, and everything seems to work.
Conversion to jpeg ate some quality, but these should still suffice (they are 3840*2160 res, might need to view them full screen, zoomed in):
Thanks for inspiring me to test things again.