As far as i can tell, california forest management essentially ended up suppressing "good fires", and didn't do enough of controlled burns, which ended up accumulating a lot of fuel to cause large fires.
Santa Cruz had huge wildfires when I was a kid in the 80s (it snowed ash even). The fire experts were pretty explicite that if the same policies were kept in place (preventing burn off) we would have those same fires 40 years later. It's 40 years later I wonder how that turned out.