The second swatch, knit on 4.5 mm needles, 0.5 mm smaller than the first swatch, was indeed exactly the same number of stitches per inch as the first. I don't know why. That's not entirely true. I can guess. I think that the up/down size of the stitch is limited by the needle size (the number of rows per inch) but the side-to-side size of the stitch is limited by the bulk of the yarn. This yarn knits at least 4-1/4 stitches per inch. More just can't be done. The yarn can't be squished into more than that. Not even to 4-1/2 stitches per inch.
I'm interested by the growing and shrinking with washing, too. It was quite striking. Above is a picture of the 2nd swatch taken while it was wet. Below is the same swatch after it had dried. That's a 6" ruler and it shows that the swatch has shrunk by about 1/2".
The two swatches side-by-side are different sizes because the second swatch had fewer rows and fewer stitches per row. At swatch two I was already confident that I'd have more than 4 inches if I just knit over 20 stitches per row. For swatch one I gave myself a large, comfortable margin (because I usually knit to tightly; I always have to put more stitches into my swatch than a loose knitter might).
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