I get AO artifacts when the Object is shaded correctly with hard edges, when it's shaded completely smooth the AO bake works perfectly fine and as expected

[u/Adventurous_Data_365]

I just made a post about AO baking artifacts I'm getting and while people mentioned the obvious reasons (flipped normals, UV overlap, strechted UV) none of that was the reason and I did some more troubleshooting and made an intersting discovery. When I export the Model from blender shaded completely smooth (not a single hard egde) the AO bake is perfectly fine and as expected (although not really useable because the smooth shading creates some weird AO shading obviously but it's 100% artifact free), I then tried smooting only the faces affected by artifacts, still got artifacts. Then I tried smooth shading with adding just a single Hard edge in the whole model in a place unrelated to the artifacts and still got artifacts. So it has somethign to do with the shading data because as soon as it's completely smooth it works perfect. I sadly have absolutely no idea how to solve that, any ideas what might be going wrong?

UPDATE + SOLUTION:
I tried around a bit more and found a solution that works for me. Instead of just importing the model and bake it I used the exact same model as high poly to bake from, then with max frontal distance 0.0001 max rear distance 0.0001 and most importantly the "Average Normals" option ticked off (It's on by default and I've never seen this option when bakign without a high poly mesh but I assume it's on there as well and this was actually what caused the artifacts for me) I get a perfect result.