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As I begin the first steps of a terrain project that is going to involve some unusually tall towers and high-set walkways, I find myself thinking about vertical movement in 40k. 9th edition has helped with the verticality issue a lot by giving us explicit 5" vertical engagement ranges and unit coherency, but actually scampering up tall terrain can be rather difficult if you lack the movement stat or a convenient charge target to scamper up a platform in the first place. So for the sake of hopping up on top of tall walls and utilizing those cool upper stories that might be too inconvenient to reach normally, I propose the following action be made available to all infantry, swarms, and beasts:

CLIMB:
Any infantry, swarm, or beast unit may perform this action during their controlling player's turn provided they do not advance or fall back. The action begins at the end of the Movement phase and is completed at the end of the Fight phase. When this action is completed, the unit may immediately move up to 12" vertically and 3" horizontally.

The idea here is basically just that, instead of fighting, you spend your whole turn shimmying up or down an especially tall terrain feature so that you'll be in a better position for the following turn, hopefully removing that issue where your units potentially end up "stranded" on high terrain or unable to utilize high terrain features to their fullest. With something like this in place, you could even make objective markers located on elevated surfaces more approachable as armies without the Fly keyword would have a way to get in range of the objective.

It does occur to me that this could be used to make a "safe" advance (moving exactly 3" horizontally with no risk of flubbing it and only moving 1 or 2 inches), but giving up your offense for the turn seems like a sufficiently big drawback to make that acceptable. Thoughts?

I think terrain features that tall should have ramps leading up to them or just be made impassable. If you place a flying unit on top then your opponent can spend an entire turn climbind up, then you fly down and leave them to spend another turn climbing down.

Clearly you're never bringing that terrain to a tourny or something. I think that is a fair compromise and I am certain that if your casual opponents think otherwise you two can come to some sort of mutual agreement that works for both of you.

The constraints of the game should not discourage you from being creative with crafting your terrain. You could also attach that rule to the ladder rather than army wide, and I also don't believe that advancing needed to be all that random in the first place.

I think terrain that tall should simply be inaccessible.
A unit on top of such a thing would be unassailable to melee units and potentially even out of range of shorter ranged guns!

IMO no level should be more than 5", so everyone has the chance to access it, and no one becomes unassailable once they're up there.
I play a melee army, my opponent filling up the top of an Imperial Bastion is absolute cancer. Especially when they're flipping Gretchin so they're too short to even see, but they're still claiming the objective they placed there.