That's dangerous when pkg is a link for whatever reason or a mount point which can't be removed.
I've avoided stable branches for update tools because backporting deprecated versions is not very elegant and dragging one or two line changes through seems silly enough. FreeBSD EoL versions quickly deteriorate as well as you know.
Well you can use the 24.1 tag to bootstrap FreeBSD 13.3 although it takes that for tolerance of EoL policy and really wanted 13.2 instead.