TL,DR: It appears that, contrary to oft-repeated advice, leave-one-out cross validation (LOO-CV) -- that is, $K$-fold CV with $K$ (the number of folds) equal to $N$ (the number of training observations) -- yields estimates of the generalization error that are the least variable for any $K$, not the most variable, assuming a certain stability condition on either the model/algorithm, the dataset, or both (I'm not sure which is correct as I don't really understand this stability condition).
Having become thoroughly confused thinking about all this, I decided to run a little simulation for the linear regression case. I simulated 10,000 datasets with $N$=50 and 3 uncorrelated predictors, each time estimateestimating the generalization error using $K$-fold CV with $K$=2, 5, 10, or 50=$N$. The R code is here. Here are the resulting means and variances of the CV estimates across all 10,000 datasets (in MSE units):