I was able to reproduce this issue on my end and entered a bug report, UE-31844. The odd thing is, I was not unable to determine if this was a limitation or in fact a bug because I could trace it back to 4.9.2 engine version. This was part of the reason I decided to enter the report.
With that said, you can modify the Min Occlusion and Max Occlusion Distance settings within the Skylight to help reduce the appearance of this issue. Let me know if you have further questions or need additional assistance.
My skylight values for Min Occ and Max Occ Distance are the defaults ones and I haven’t this bug on 4.11 (and 4.9-4.10 before) with the exact same project.
But changing this values, in fact, help a lot!
I too have this issue in 4.18.2. I have a lot of big flat metallic surfaces and its really noticable. In the included images a textured plane and cubemap are reflected on a sphere, with and without DFAO (SSR disabled). I saw its tracked as “Won’t Fix”, but i implore you to reconsider. Thanks in advance.