Today I tore down and cleaned the hot end of my Ender 3 V3 SE. I should have done this a long time ago, considering our house feels like the dustiest house in the central valley. As expected, both cooling fans were full of dust, as well as just about everything else inside the hot end.
I also tightened the gantry belts, which was a lot easier than expected, and adjusted the nut that adjusts the hot end's lower travel wheel's height. The hot end has been loose for a while, but my little brother had assured me it was normal (assembly and study was his project, after all.)
Fixing the hot end wobble adjusted how it sat on the gantry significantly. When I tried to run a print after reassembling the printer, it immediately jammed the print head into the build plate. This left a nice groove in the plate, and a hole where the toolhead warmed up before the print. I leveled the printer, and now it's on the table chugging away happily. Unsure if this will solve the problem i wrote about a couple days ago, but it seems to have solved a few other problems.