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The city was surrendered! Dude! Sherman decided to burn it! What other city was burnd to the ground after surrender and hostilities ceased! I’m not talking Lee I’m talking the people of Atlanta and the Confederates moved out!
Read the text! What ever you want to think is fine with me> Sherman on a Yankee whim burned Atlanta! It’s history! now go beat another dead horse!

The city was surrendered! Dude! Sherman decided to burn it! What other city was burnd to the ground after surrender and hostilities ceased! I’m not talking Lee I’m talking the people of Atlanta and the Confederates moved out!

My understanding of the situation, and people who know better are more than welcome to correct it for me, is that Sherman was about to cut off his logistics train and march his army (at least the portion that wasn't tasked with going back after Hood) across Georgia to Savannah, essentially "living off the land" as Winfield Scott had done during the march in Mexico a couple decades earlier.

Sherman couldn't afford the troops to occupy Atlanta. He was taking them with him or sending them after Hood. He did not want - in fact from a military perspective could not have tolerated - a major urban area/military center of communication in his rear that could have been reoccupied by his enemy following his departure. Even though the city had surrendered, the Confederate States of American had not.

Removing Atlanta as real estate with military value makes sense. Sherman would have been criminally negligent had he done otherwise. The possible alternative situation has a nice parallel in the 2003 Iraq War - the rapid drive on Baghdad with forces insufficient to occupy the territory won on the way there (and the refusal on humanitarian grounds to level those Iraqi urban areas in the path of the drive/bypassed by the drive and left either unoccupied or insufficiently occupied) caused all sorts of problems down the road.