The solution I settled with was to use a 2m Thunderbolt cable to move the thing away from my desk. In an office environment this works, but in quiet rooms it may not.
Compared to the MB, the fan is loud. I even stated writing my own fan control, but it can't fix the fan that's either definitely audible at 4500RPM or dead silent at 0RPM (which is not sustainable even for very light workloads on Linux).