Can a single UART port be used for different components on tx/rx? Such as my receiver to UART2 rx pad and telemetry out from UART2 tx pad?
And setup both on the same UART on the configurator ports tab?

Shared UARTs work in specific cases. Specifically, MSP can be shared with telemetry and blackbox. Those are the only cases as far as I know. In these cases, MSP works when the copter is disarmed, and the secondary function works when the copter is armed (and MSP stops working).

In theory, you could share a receiver with telemetry because they are both one-way, but in practice, this has never been implemented in Cleanflight as far as I know. One limitation would be that the UARTs may require the two functions to be the same baud rate, and the two functions may not work at the same baud rate.

I've never hooked up the RX pad on any telemetry install I've used--both FrSky and S.Port. S.Port can be bidirectional for e.g. flashing firmware, but when used for telemetry, only the TX pin is required from the FC to the RX.

I thought that was the case, and was just going to do it for simplicity and to keep my build clean (less wire clutter). was wondering so i could use frsky sbus and frsky smartport telemetry on the same uart pad set.

You can't do that with smartport as it is a half-duplex UART. The receiver requests telemetry from the FC so you need to connect both rx and tx, it takes up a whole port. The OSD however only uses half a port, so you can try combining that with sbus.