Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:
As far as I can tell, this is a riff on the classic 'crash zoom' effect, which in my personal experience started to become popular in visual effect shots around 2002, first becoming popular in the remake of Battlestar Galactica and of course, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones . Historically popular in horror films, the shots as shown in the more recent space operas would most likely be impossible with regards to maintaining focus on the subject of the zoom and are used as such to induce a 'documentary' style of realism in what otherwise would be images depicting high fantasy environments. Crash Zoom - Oxford Reference Here is a video demonstrating how this is done for real with...
Full answer by Stephen Francis: https://movies.stackexchange.com/a/112676 (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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