Definitely don’t defrag regularly because, yes, it will wear out the SSD. However, defragging once will move the files into a contiguous chunk of the partition and allow you greater success at shrinking it.

I seem to remember disabling hibernation and swapfile, then defragging, seemed to significantly increase the chances of success shrinking an active partition.

(Re-enable hibernation/swap after the shrink operation is finished.)

If you mean the “Manually block sleep and screen locking” toggle in the battery icon in the systray, then no, that didn’t stop the lid action.

Such courage! /s