Other than an update of pfsense actual version, there should never be a reason to have to reboot pfsense.

Common issue where people believe this is the case in change in firewall rules, and not working as they think... This is most likely related to existing "state" for whatever trying your trying to change what happens with. And the reboot clears all this. But if you do have an existing state causing a rule not to function as you believe - you can either kill that specific state, kill all the states or just wait for them to time out on their own, etc.