I was watching my friend livestream and he gave up because he couldn't climb out a cave even though it clearly shows that you can, anyone else having this issue not being able to grab ledges?

Yes, I cannot climb ledges, but I'm not sure if it is since 1.03 or even before.
I'm not sure I ever knew how to climb them (except when I can jump above them, which is not climbing...)

All you have to do to climb a ledge is stand still in front of it and hit jump while holding forward.

Same here and I saw few more topics about it on steam/gog :/

I got it bugged on me too. It fixed it self when I interacted with the boat I was trying to get in.
After that I was able to climb on board from the water and climb on the shore.

Same problem here. I can no longer climb ledges.

Quite frustrating to see Keira Metz saunter up a low ledge while the mighty Witcher keeps jumping and refusing to use his bloody (literally. just killed some monsters ;P) hands to grab the ledge and pull himself up.

Eventually got him up the ledge using some Jackie Chan-styled jump roll maneuver (read: after some 10 minutes of spamming the Jump button).

Apart from that particularly painful event, I have somehow always managed to bypass most ledges using various jumping tricks though.

it's weird, sometime I climb them easily, sometimes (same ledge) I just cannot (and then jumping tricks, half a mile walk...)
also: same "low" ledge, same speed (0 or walking or running...) : Geralt jumps and fall back, or jumps and get through or climbs...

Some ledges you can jump up onto. Others you need to stand still and pull yourself up on. If you hit the wrong set of buttons you will fail. I have not seen any change in this mechanic for v1.03 or v1.04.

We are talking about ledges where you need to grab and pull yourself up, and there are quite a lot of ledges where you can pull up from, not just marked ledges in certain areas.

I can confirm it is a bug because I actually restarted a game, went into the Keira Metz quest again and was able to grab the same ledge and pull myself up. However, since my progress between the two games were different, I might not have triggered the bug yet. Now I keep having this constant urge to find a ledge to climb every now and then to make sure I can still climb ledges. lol

Well when you go to the wake you race some female to pull the sword. This is loaded with ledges. I've done it before and after the patches without any issues. And all of these are the pull yourself up type ledges.