MacBook Pro bloated--how-to Apple Repair?

I noticed this week that my lightly used 2017 MacBook Pro (w/ Touch Bar) Z0UN7LL/A no longer closes completely and wobbles on a flat surface rather than sitting on the foot pads. Yup, battery bloat. I don't even want to close the lid because the trackpad bezel will probably scratch the display (more?). It's a very lightly used machine; it makes me a little crazy it has done this. My 2010 MacBook Air went seven+ years and never had anything except, at the end, one arrow key that didn't work. This was an *expensive* machine and now it's puffed up like a two-day-old roadkill pig.

I replaced a bloated battery in a Dell XPS 13 once, but the 84 steps in the iFixit guide just to get the battery extracted looked a bit more than I'm interested in doing. So, I'm a bit miffed to say, it seems I need to get it repaired. I live on an island with no Apple Store reachable without flying and a 14-day quarantine. So, ship-in repair at Apple seems like the only choice. And that also means shipping a device with a Li-ion battery via air.

Anybody with any experience with this? How-to setup an Apple repair? Where to begin? Cost? Time? Shipping the device (FedEx and UPS are the options here) with the Li-ion battery? As we speak, I'm doing another Time Machine backup and, simultaneously, running the battery down.

One of my other concerns is that the bottom lid (and keyboard bezel for that matter), are pretty well bowed out now. Are they irreparably stretched / will they ever be flat again? What, if anything can/will Apple do about that?

Thanks in advance for any advice!