Maybe? The line is more blurry here, but there are probably cases where it's more or less easy to make the distinction.

If data is recorded on a permanent medium, it can be arbitrarily retrieved, an explicit delete operation is needed to get rid of it, and this deletion can be scheduled to happen at an arbitrary time - that might easily be understood as "destroying evidence".

If you want asynchronous communication, you will need to produce records of some kind, which can be evidence. That's nothing new.

Maybe if you have a system where the information must be exchanged live and falls off a cliff immediately no matter if it was observed or not, say, like a video conferencing tool - I wonder how the courts see that. It gets much closer to an interesting edge case than something with a 24-hour retention policy.

That's not permanent.

If this would be detrimental to your case, perhaps stop doing shady shit.

That such cases can exist doesn't mean it's not clear-cut here.

In the vast majority of cases, two engineers will agree on the question "is this data persisted or ephemeral" and the fact that the line is blurry doesn't mean we can't know when it's been crossed.