I'm using LazReport and I've been annoyed by the lack of zooming int the designer for a long time. I wrote a patch to add such a functionality,
https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/lazarus/lazarus/-/issues/40447 (the patch is for trunk, id: 17e62ec).
Since it is rudimentary and it is based on canvas scaling, for now it is limited to 1:1 and 2:1 scales. Nevertheless, I hope it will be of great help for anybody working with.
I would appreciate it if anyone else interested could do some testing, because maybe I'm only using it in a certain way and can't find all the possible problems/regressions.