Timing is important here. Yes, it's a tinderbox, but it doesn't have to burn at the worst possible time to cause a massive scale firestorm. If a wildfire forms when the weather is not very windy, or colder, or moister, they do not spread as far, or as fast, or cause as much damage.

Exactly one of those is a non-anthropogenic source, lightning strike. Those tend not to occur during dry, windy conditions because of shear and needing to have enough moisture for cloud formation. Exception: when there already is a fire, pyrocumulus lightning strikes can add more ignition locations.

So far as the anthropogenic sources, we're in control of those by definition. We should try to prevent those as much as possible outside of prescribed burns. Everything burns sooner or later, but it doesn't have to go up all at once.

Much of the ecosystem depends on fire, but wildfires that do not do as much damage as the fires California has seen recently. But hey, the fires in Paradise shouldn't really be seen as a forest management problem, but rather as an intense urban conflagration. In much of Paradise, the trees survived, but fires jumped from house to house by wind-borne sparks. That was a disaster of urban planning, where evacuation routes had been made narrower in the past 10 years as population increased.

So we can't blame PG&E for all of that. But we can blame them for crappy maintenance in an area that regularly sees 100mph winds.