It is conflict free in this sense if no change is rejected, and if the result eventually converges (e.g. if two parties receive the full set of changes, they will end up with the same result, but they may diverge locally until all changes have been synchronised to all replicas).
This does mean sometimes producing something that have "application level conflicts" or something that a user will consider a conflict even if the application is perfectly fine with it. Depending on how good the heuristics for determining which changes to keep are, this may be obnoxious or appear perfectly reasonable.
E.g. two users start with the same empty document. They each type a sentence. Merge happens. Did they intend the document to have just their sentence, or do they want both? User A wrote that their mutual boss is an idiot; user B wrote that their mutual boss is a genius. Now what do they want to remain? There's no way for software to resolve that automatically which doesn't have disturbing implications.
But there certainly are some alternatives that are better than others. E.g. you'd probably prefer to retain both sentences, so you can agree on which to keep. You'd certainly prefer to keep at least one to deleting both.
This does mean sometimes producing something that have "application level conflicts" or something that a user will consider a conflict even if the application is perfectly fine with it. Depending on how good the heuristics for determining which changes to keep are, this may be obnoxious or appear perfectly reasonable.
E.g. two users start with the same empty document. They each type a sentence. Merge happens. Did they intend the document to have just their sentence, or do they want both? User A wrote that their mutual boss is an idiot; user B wrote that their mutual boss is a genius. Now what do they want to remain? There's no way for software to resolve that automatically which doesn't have disturbing implications.
But there certainly are some alternatives that are better than others. E.g. you'd probably prefer to retain both sentences, so you can agree on which to keep. You'd certainly prefer to keep at least one to deleting both.