Photons have no mass, period. An ensemble of photons may have a non-zero invariant mass, but there's just no way in which it's correct to say a photon has a mass.
This has nothing to do with saying that you can't convert mass to energy. Electron-positron pair creation from ultra high energy gamma rays has been a known thing for a long time. Pulsars are thought to run partly off of pair creation off the magnetic field, etc.
Cite: ask any actual physicist. I hate to appeal to authority, but this is the view I was taught in grad school (PhD, UCB, 2001), and I have never spoken to anyone in physics or astrophysics who thought "relativistic mass" was helpful.
I do have a question though, if you or anyone else wants to clear this up for me. Which kinds of energy are no longer considered part of a system's "mass"? I gather that kinetic energy is not. What about various forms of binding energy?
The essential idea is that mass is Lorentz invariant, which means it does not change under changes of coordinate systems. So mass must be independent of velocity and orientation, which are just artifacts of how you measure anyways.
The law of conservation of mass, or principle of mass conservation, states that for any system closed to all transfers of matter and energy (both of which have mass), the mass of the system must remain constant over time, as system mass cannot change quantity if it is not added or removed.