A large part is the desire of homeowners to have pretty trees and shrubbery around their lovely homes, and it does not matter if they are Reps or Dems, they all do it. A lot of this damage was suburban burns and had nothing to do with federal lands and forests.
No, that was not a problem. The problem was CARB not alowihng burns of the brush in the forest. CalFire failed to burn the brush. The brush (from the 2016 El Nino) turned into ladder fuel and was a disaster waiting to happen. Look at the videos and pictures around Paradise. Many trees are still standing, some burned, some just singed, some spared. The biggest threat to those trees was the stick built houses next to them. The biggest threat to the houses was the ember storm from the wildfire raging outside of town.
Put more simply, any sort of fire inside town could have been easily put out. The firefighters could only watch it burn last week because putting out any single fire would have been futile.