just curious how people deal with this, i recently did a timelapse where the exposure of the ground changed quite often (about 5 times in a 10 sec clip) because of clouds moving and letting the sun shine through. Would this be considered flickering since its only affecting the bottom part of the frame? To me its distracting and unpleasant to have the ground exposure change so much and so often, how are you guys dealing with this? perhaps changing the interval between each shot so that the clouds move slower/more gradual? i believe i shot the aforementioned timelapse as 1 every 7 seconds

This is hard to correct. I'd try to avoid those situations when shooting. It's not really "flicker" and you might make things worse if trying to deflicker this.

If you have a sequence like that - try to lower the lights in LR, increase the shadows just to take out contrasts.
Then apply the Motion blur plus when exporting the video to smooth things further.