The camera zooming out and back in was more or less an unintentional bug from the cinemachine camera and using target groups, but it works surprisingly well.
For the flock AI we used a really good tutorial from Sebastian Lague on Boids as a base and our 2nd programmer did a really good job on adapting and adjusting it for our specific use case. Overall I'm really happy with the result and thanks for giving such nice feedback :D.