one change in #FreeBSD pkgbase compared to freebsd-update is that when a kernel module is updated, you get an entire new kernel package (FreeBSD-kernel-generic) rather than just an updated module (foo.ko).

the downside is the update is larger, since the kernel package is about 45MB, but the upside is that because it updates /boot/kernel/kernel, the current patch level is always shown in uname -r after rebooting.

i think this is probably better overall, because a lot of people used to get confused about why they'd update to 15.0p3, but uname still showed 15.0p1, or whatever.