But you would not be destroying data. It's an UI interaction which you're applying (i.e. closing the modal view, and thus navigating back to the previous state of your UI).

I agree with you that modals are abused. Modals should - in my opinion - be used for immediate actions such as your example.

Side panels however are fine in my book. In the end, we're talking about the same thing: example.com/fruits/new - Navigating (there you have it) to this URL should provide the user with an interface to fill out a form to create a new fruit.

In practice this could just as easily be a side panel triggered from the fruits list page, by clicking on the "new fruit" link. The URL should reflect that UI state change.