I found this page that describes the fix which corrected my issue. Mostly, set to the current distribution, in my case 2.4.5 DEPRECATED and run "sudo pkg-static install -f pkg"
https://agent31.net/blog/2021/03/10/fixing-stalled-package-manager-in-pfsense-2-4-5-p1-easily-in-5-minutes/
This procedure fixed the package manager on my 2.4.5-p1.