@lisyarus
Does changing the roughness improve or worsen the effect? If so, it would suggest precision loss somewhere in the BSDF.
Dividing by a variable less than 2^-23 is the usual suspect.
An rng bug could maybe introduce patterns, too, but most likely the BSDF.
I tend to reject sampling pdfs below 1e-6 since it will likely introduce either a firefly or +inf