VB-extension.json conflicts - how can we prevent them?

Summary:

We have two different developer teams working in different modules, on different branches, in the same project, both of hcm.extension, but we keep getting conflicts when we merge to the same branch for deployments.

We keep getting VB-extension.json conflicts and I'd like to understand these better to see what we can do to prevent them.

Content (please ensure you mask any confidential information):

I'm hesitant to resolve the conflict by accepting one over the other because I've noticed they merge all of the changes back down to the other branches. We want to keep their code separate because one team is ahead in timelines than the other, so when we merge to deploy to other environments we don't want both of the changes to go at the same time.