This old sense is encountered, like in your example, but much more often "fruits" is used in the culinary sense.

Many people perceive your example as a metaphor, the results of the labor being compared with the fruits of a tree, but in reality the direction of the metaphor has historically been opposite, the fruits of the tree being called thus because they were considered the useful results of its cultivation.

Life, species, gene, organism - we don’t actually have consistent definitions of what those are. Biology is the science of fluid spectrums, so any rigid classification you’d propose breaks down at the edges.

However this is annoying, because especially with the modern fashion that linguistics shall be only descriptive and not prescriptive, like in the past, many words have become more and more ambiguous.

For this reason, misunderstandings have become more and more frequent, especially when using a medium like an Internet forum, which forces conciseness. Now, if you want to be certain that you will be understood correctly, more and more often you are forced to first define exactly many of the words that you intend to use, because the same words may be used by others with different meanings, even if in earlier literature everybody used only the meaning that you want.