The matching for conflicts performs a file glob style match of the patterns first with the package name without version (i.e. as reported by "pkg query "%n") and then against the full package name ("%n-%v").
It has been common practice to use patterns like "bash-[0-9]*" to match all versions of bash packages, for example, and to not match bash-completions, as "bash-*" would do.
But a pattern of just "bash" will have exactly the same effect as "bash-[0-9]*" due to the way, the check has been implemented.
This review contains patches for all ports that have CONFLICTS entries redundantly ending in "-[0-9]*" and removes that version wildcard.
If portmgr agrees, these CONFLICTS could be simplified in one go.
Else I could generate (hundreds) of reviews for the individual port committers to approve.
Since this patch is against the ports tree as of 2021-10-28 13:00:00 UTC and so many ports are affected, it might become partially stale within a few days or weeks.
I'm of course willing to rebase the patch as requireed, if I get approval to commit these changes.