Just for completeness:
portsnap
is
planned to be removed at some point in time. But it's still part of 13.0-RELEASE, so it won't go away until (earliest) EOL of the 13-STABLE branch. As far as I know, there is no "replacement" planned so far.
Apart from that, it was always an alternative to get the ports tree directly from its source repository, which worked using
svn
until recently, but is now switched to
git
. Using the repository directly always had some advantages, one of them being that you can select the branch you want (while
portsnap
was always based on the "main" branch, "latest" in pkg repos).
For people wanting to just fetch from repos and not interested in doing development themselves, there was
svnup
in the past, and there's
gitup
now to replace it. Those are tools that just fetch (and don't support anything else) and aim for ease of use (one simple command…)
As for the config issue with the branch name: the "master" branch was renamed to "main" quite some time ago, and the default config of
gitup
followed that. If you still have a config referring to "master", it seems you didn't upgrade ports/packages for some time