I’d almost agree, but when you have an entire city burning for at least a week or more (remember, firefighting is pretty much out of the question!)—and there are potentially hundreds of these fires going on after a relatively small nuclear exchange....
No analysis can truly match reality, but the Kuwaiti oil fires was hundreds of oil wells burning uncontrolled for weeks. People knew the heat, CO2, and particulate output, the geo area, and the winds. they then applied worst-case nuclear winter models, and then compared that to “reality” ground measurements.
The models were completely wrong. The amount of nuclear winter cooling expected was orders of magnitudes off from the observation.
Critics then began to nitpick details like, “well in a fire caused by a nuke, the particle size would be different, so your model is wrong” sort of horse fertilizer.
The analysis of the Siberian forest fire went in a similar way, a million or so acres burning with no control producing particulate, ash, hydrocarbons, and CO2.
I was involved with some of this when it was hot. My opinion at the time was that the whole thing was a made-up excuse to demand nuclear disarmament, the USA first of course.
Niven-Pournelle’s novel Footfall has a take on surviving nuclear winter, though in the fiction, it was an asteroid strike in the Indian Ocean that caused cloudy conditions over most of Earth for many months.