As another said, mixing bombers and fighters is intended and optimal because of decoy flares distracting Point Defense. Heron is definitely not the only viable carrier, though (but Targeting Feed is pretty useful).
Key importance is carrier skills are no longer a per-captain investment and instead there's just two fleet-wide skills the player can pick up (whose effectiveness is buffed on a per-ship basis if the ship itself has an AI officer on it). They're in the first Leadership section, about the middle of the screen "Carrier Group" and "Fighter Uplink". Notably, I have yet to get them in my current run, so take my further advice with a grain of salt, but: in the previous version I considered the Target Leading Accuracy bonus on the now-defunct Strike Group(?) skill to be mandatory for carrier captains since it meant your bombers* wont(tm) miss. In accordance with my previous understanding of fighters, I'd consider Fighter Uplink, which took over the Target Leading effect from the old skill, to also be mandatory/high priority for a carrier fleet captain. Aside from that, and I think back in 0.8 (? the versions blur together for me, it's been a while so I cant remember if that was the carrier rework update) fighters were *much* too strong, but they play largely the same nowadays- aside from, obviously, being a little weaker than you may be used to as a result of much-needed nerfs/balancing. In my experience, though, they're still perfectly viable. The one issue they have, at least to me, is that there's no skill that directly buffs their damage (ex, Target Analysis doesn't afaik, and polarized armor exists now). So, with all the skills that increase a ship's resistances in various forms- while a ship captain has skills that effectively counter those defensive bonuses with their own offensive ones, fighters/bombers get the short end of the stick and simply become less effective against elite captains. This, however, can be mitigated by the fact that you have a full carrier-centric fleet and thus no lack of bombs to dump on them. There's no kill like overkill, after all.
If there's not so many missiles flying around you can't risk moving your own ship then you probably need more**
*less-so if you're not like me though since I use almost exclusively Khopesh, Perditions, and Cobras (speaking of, Perditions got buffed this latest update- now there's 3 per wing and they cost more OP)
**Exaggeration, but please do post images if you manage to pull this off