First you need to check where the exhaust vents on the Laptop are. Some blow the hot air out the bottom, which would make a cooling pad inefficient or even make the entire situation worse.
That said, Laptops can be run just fine without cooling pads, BUT they'll throttle earlier and have lower sustained clocks for both the GPU and CPU without one. With a cooling pad you'll likely see slightly higher boost clocks for both the GPU and CPU which translates to slightly faster rendertimes.
Laptops don't overheat per see, they have in-built throttling mechanisms that adjust the clock speeds of your cpu cores and gpu core and vram clock to make them produce less heat. So overall, unless you have bad thermal paste or totally clogged vents and the heat can't escape at all, a Laptop shouldn't break just because it gets hot. Performance of course suffers.