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If you place a large number of identical elements in a regular pattern, then look at them from a distance, they will make strange warped grid patters that shift as you move your viewpoint, as shown in this video. This is found not only in Minecraft, but also in any program.
I'm wondering if this effect has a name and how it can be explained.
It's a moiré pattern caused by aliasing. In your examples, the Moiré patterns occur when a repetitive pattern of high spatial frequency is sampled at low resolution.
Consider the Wikipedia example reference image:
The bricks form a repetitive pattern. Because there's many bricks, the resulting texture has a high spatial frequency. Here's the same image with a reduced resolution:
Lowering the resolution has lowered our sample rate to the point that an obvious moiré pattern occurs. Because there are fewer pixels, information has been lost. And because the brick texture isn't perfectly aligned to the pixel grid, the information isn't lost evenly - some bricks lose more red brick pixels than their neighbors & the similarly for the white mortar pixels. This puts the periodic spatial signal of the brickwork out of phase. The threshold for this problem is determined by the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem.
Mipmapping can be used to reduce the artifacts on moiré prone textures. But in your Minecraft example, the 'texture' is effectively made across multiple blocks, so it can't be mitigated by mipmaps. Spatial anti-aliasing could help, but only to a point as we are limited by the finite nature of the screen. Generally speaking, the goal is to get something that's good enough through some combination of graphics techniques (to reduces the artifacts), art / texture choices (to avoid error prone visuals) and game design (to make occurrences brief &/or less impactful).
