Hey, I repair desktops and laptops for my day job and just wanted to throw my two cents in because it's the Internet. Also you're cool and I like trying to help cool people.
It really sounds like the bearings for the fan are failing. Especially if it still sounds rough after cleaning. If you're trying to clean the laptop fan with air, please hold the fan in place so it doesn't free spin. Free spinning past it's rated rpm will actually cause damage to the fan (and if fast enough backwards, it can cause a reverse current back into your motherboard, that's extremely rare nower days, but if you had an air compressor, it's possible)
It looks like you're using a Lenovo laptop (maybe one of the Legion ones?) If you need to do a fan replacement, it's either extremely easy and just popping off the bottom casing and replacing the fan, or it's a little more involved and you might need to take the heatsink off too. That's a good time to replace your thermal paste if you haven't done it in a couple years.
If it is a Lenovo laptop, their support site actually gives you the exact model number for each of their parts, but other major brands have pretty easily replaceable parts just by searching for the name of the laptop model + part.
If another deep clean doesn't work out and this all sounds like way too much, I do recommend getting it into a shop at some point. Fan failure can cook a gpu or processor and with laptops, they're pretty much impossible to replace as individual components. Which means replacing the whole motherboard, and that can get very expensive. If this is the model I think it is, this does share a heat pipe between both cpu and gpu to both fans, so you're more likely to just get a lot of thermal throttling and shut downs before it cooks itself, but better safe than sorry.
Feel free to shoot any questions if you'd like more help and sorry about the essay in your ask box. Best of luck!
WOAH this is super helpful, thank you so much! We gave it a deep clean and i will admit oops we did not hold the fan in place while we cleaned a lot of it. never gave it more than a couple short bursts of air but it seemed like everything was where it was supposed to be. it currently works and nothing seems to be heating up at all, it just sounds like a helicopter starting up but it goes away. no clue what's goin on yet. air IS coming out the vents and we cleaned a LOT of dust and hair out of it, so it seems to be....faring well aside from the occasional noise. id love more help at some point if possible because google is a bitch trying to figure out exactly how to work this stuff.
