"Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres[...] California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire."
https://massivesci.com/articles/megafire-california-climate-...
Unfortunately this article was written in Sept 2020 so I think (but don't know) that those are baked in. But in the big picture, yes, nature will eventually burn what needs to be burned. However the hope is for controlled burns, not burns that destroy lives and property. The Camp Fire in 2018 alone killed 85 people. That's a steep price to pay for refusing to do controlled burns.
So the data the article is using is from before the 2020 fire season. Only 15.4 million acres to go.
But over the last century or so, well intentioned environmentalism has meant that these fires get put out before they get going. This has led to a very dense accumulation of this underbrush and young growth trees, which essentially have turned California forests into tinderboxes. Now when a fire starts and gets out of control, it gets so intense that it takes out old growth trees with it.
We’ve managed to turn natural forest fires from something that was a rejuvenative part of the ecosystem’s life cycle into an apocalyptic death blow.
Seems like you're talking out your ass about something you don't understand. To make the claim that "90% of California's forest shouldn't exist"(paraphrasing, correct me if I misinterpreted) as you did in one of your other comments is absolutely absurd. It illustrates a complete lack of understanding regarding the extremely varied and countless ecosystems present in California. California is not "a desert", California "has a lot of desert".
To be clear though: It definitely HAS been proven that the absurd amounts of fire suppression California has engaged in over the past several decades has indeed increased the severity of wildfires[1].
[1] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/ES14...