Firefighters were shocked to enter the town and see so much foliage unburnt between the ruins of smoking buildings. You can see some of those pictures on the Wikipedia page for Paradise, CA.
While the trees and dry bush do provide the bulk of the fuel for fires, man-made structures are far more flammable than the forests that surround them, especially in the towns consisting of older structures that don't have modern anti-fire alterations.
I'm not sure why firefighters would be shocked as the fire scientists at (e.g.) the USDA Forest Service have been doing research on this for many years:
CA forests are built around wildfires, and have adjusted to them over the centuries. We have not.
(The firefighters were shocked because they weren't expecting the trees in the town to be almost untouched, given the devastation in the surrounding forests.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise,_California#/media/Fi...
You can see that the outer layer of the trees burned but they retained their form.
Seeing this I can imagine that tree rings for the sequoias probably have a lot to teach us.
Thinking of how to deal with edge cases is not hard people.
Fire breaks are good if you can get them and maintain them, but you’re probably better off addressing that and other factors through the Insurance market.
You also still need to actually maintain the forests to reduce risk. That means allowing some fires to burn so there isn’t a massive fuel build up, and removing dead trees which will burn and explode instead of leaving them as mulch. You still need a market based solution to encourage people to cull the woods near their property though because sometimes the only thing keeping responsible property owners from culling the woods near their property lines are their own neighbors who outvote them when it comes to making a decision. California is very democratic like that.
As to how? Like many other govt infrastructure projects, eminent domain. Except this land nobody will be living on, it will probably just be uninhabited farm or forest land or already owned by the state.
But the government doesn't allow that to happen by over-regulating the insurance industry.
It won't be governments which remove these towns. Or at least their structures.