I can think of some “programming best practices” that can help with reducing merge conflicts, such as making small functions/methods, but I see it as a positive side effect.
I don’t think avoiding merge conflicts should be a goal we actively try to reach. Writing readable code organized in atomic commits will already help you get fewer conflicts and will make them easier to resolve.
I’ve seen too many junior and students being distracted from getting their task done because they spent so much time “coordinating” on order to avoid these “scary” merge conflicts