Order out of chaos happens all the time outside of living beings. When salt water dries formerly random molecules of NaCL form regular, organized, predictable crystals. You can’t reliably make such broad statements about all applications of the laws of thermodynamics as you have here.
I think one of the problems explaining the second law is that the words are wrong. Some how, the loss of smoothness and order are equated to chaos and increasing entropy. A perfectly smooth universe without gravitational or temperature differences is the end product of the second law. It is a dead universe from which energy can no longer be extracted and used.
In your example, the evaporated water is the cost of salt crystals. It is an incomplete example.