Also in a community, not everyone (or maybe, very few) has a 100 feet room to clear and maintain.
Edit: Even if you do have 100 feet to maintain, go on a two week vacation and see how many leaves gather.
You don't need a 100-foot break to protect your house from burning leaves. The 100-foot break is to protect your house from the incinerating radiation of torching trees.
You can technically even have trees within the 100-foot break. The goal is to prevent a situation where individually burning trees accelerate combustion in a feedback loop. If they're burning more slowly they're radiating less energy and thus you don't need as much space to the house.
>>Sometimes, that channel of upward-flowing air can collapse in one small spot. Then the hot air in the atmosphere plummets through the weak point. “You get a very fast wind moving down toward the ground, and when it hits the ground, it spreads like jelly slopping across the floor,” Williams said. “It can also send white-hot air out in front of the flame, incinerating the landscape before the actual flame has arrived. It can cause forests to spontaneously combust without coming into contact with a flame.”
When this upward-moving air pattern stays strong, it creates other kinds of problems. It can loft burning wood high into the atmosphere, carrying it many miles away from the center of the fire. When this debris finally lands, it can start new fires. In 2011, Williams lived dozens of miles from the edge of the blaze, yet he remembers semi-burned sticks falling like drizzle in his backyard. “These were twigs that you hold in your hand and say, ‘Wow, this actually weighs something. This made it 35 miles in the air,’” he said." https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/californ...
https://www.readyforwildfire.org/prepare-for-wildfire/get-re...