I just backpacked through major burn zones from 2003 and 2020, and that is exactly how it worked. Mt Washington was burned to the ground in 2003 (B and B Complex fires), every single tree was burned down, even the big ones. The current new growth is about 5-10ft. In between Bend and Crescent there is a strip of forest that is completely orange because of the drought: top to bottom, every tree; it looks painted. The burn from last year near Lake Detroit has regions where no tree survived due to drought + fire. I recommend you backpack/drive/hike parts of Central Oregon to see the damage, and impending risk, for yourself.

Mega fires are not the healthier small fires that do what you describe. The energy release from the built up, continuous mass of old fuel is literally in the scale of thermal flash from a nuclear weapon. It is unreal, and kills everything - sometimes even sterilizing soil 10+ Ft underground.

Lots of small fires means it never gets that bad. We’re well past that point now.

> That's not how it works. Most larger trees survive fires just fine, they just don't look very pretty for a while afterwards.

In theory that's how it should work. The problem is when you have heat plus drought conditions... the wildfires consume everything.

For example, the Castle fire in California consumed over a tenth of the entire population of giant sequoias. Giant sequoias are pretty fire resistant due to their size and height, but this fire devastated them.

Australia is very different/unique. There are trees and plants in Australia that require fire for the seeds to sprout. Fires have been part of the ecosystem for so long over there that it has adapted. What you're describing sounds more like temperate rain forests of the west coast where pockets of wetness and some trees (like the Douglas Fir) make a fire less all consuming. But given that these forests have become drier and given things like pine beetle which is doing well because the winters aren't cold enough to control it the nature of the fires is changing. The fires are bigger, hotter, and destroy larger swaths of the forest.

AFAIK over the last few decades it is well understood that fires should be left to burn and generally this happens unless they threaten population areas. In theory this should mean that the next fire season has less fuel to burn but it's not working.

I'm not sure what the author is talking about is really current practices since I've heard the opposite so many times. What he describes seem to be mostly past practices.

> There are trees and plants in Australia that require fire for the seeds to sprout

There are trees in the US that require fire to propagate. The lodgepole pine, for example, is ubiquitous across western North America