Just wanted to follow up on this and give you a big thank you Herve for your advice - and you were absolutely right that 64MB is required. I've been surviving with a lower resolution, but thought "enough is enough" and a week ago bought a programmer (£5 from Amazon) and then carefully followed the steps here:
https://github.com/tylernguyen/x1c6-hackintosh/blob/main/docs/BIOS/modding-the-BIOS.md
I had Macronix BIOS but the normal instructions worked absolutely fine, just another command-line argument to add. Was extremely nervous doing this! Rebooted into BIOS and the Advanced menu was visible. So, upped the video memory to 64MB and with few other changes I've now got glorious 4K from my X1 Carbon Gen 5 using the DisplayPort over USB-C. One cable!