Have you been through the Redding burn scar? What happened there isn't a "cleansing fire" that's going to leave the forest healthier. The forest is gone. It's not going to come back without a lot of human effort, and even then not before we're all much older.
What's going to grow back in those areas is mostly scrub, and that in turn is going to further affect the microclimate around the Redding area, making one of the hottest microclimates in the state even hotter and drier.
Yes, there are biomes that benefit from a regular low-intensity fire. Those are the biomes that scientists are talking about when they say "let it burn". Scrub and grasslands can burn and be back to scrub within a year. Old growth forest can survive a low-intensity fire and be a lot healthier afterward.
But the young forests that have grown in all of the clear-cut areas from the state's mining days, those don't bounce right back from a high-intensity fire.
I imagine it might be possible to put effort into growing healthy forests even after clear cutting / devastating fire. But this may be more expensive than the profit from clear cutting.
It is interesting how strong an example clear cutting forests is for externalizing the costs... and pushing them more than a century down the timeline. Should this be something that we regulate? Or, should we include the cost for the future forest fires in the price of the timber?
Similarly, shouldn't the gas producing countries pay for the cost of the CO2 their product disposes into the atmosphere?
Truth is forest fires are necessary. The bugs in forest fires, like destroyed homes and lives are because we are doing it wrong: https://www.vox.com/2018/8/7/17661096/california-wildfires-2...