These feel incredibly unrelated to me. Why does that matter at all for the display choice? A modal is getting used because it's a view into another section of the application that doesn't lose the current location of the user.
Further - users (and I mean normal paying users, not HN commentators) rarely ever give a shit about URLs. It's just not important to most people what the string of characters is.
So...
Anywhere you've got multiple steps to complete, or an adjacent resource that might be related and viewed/edited in the context of the parent resource.
Or a form is being filled in and a user wants to enable extras, which requires filling in a different form, etc...
The modal is about not losing the current place for the user. Because most current users don't use multiple tabs/windows for the same product, and they don't pay any attention to the urls.
"Dont open a modal" in cases where the user is likely going to get lost in a detour otherwise is bad advice.