Comment by asveikau

FreeBSD is moving to a scheme where the base system is managed with pkg. In the release notes for last month's 15.0 release, they suggest that this will be mandatory in 16.0.

The ports tree will still be very different from base, but I feel this may erode some of the difference between FreeBSD and a typical Linux distro in terms of user experience, with respect to base vs ports. You'll update both with pkg.