Due to our very short lifespan, "thousands of years" seems like a big deal to us, but it's quite a short time to the earth. Forest recovery in a couple of thousand years would be "bouncing back" in that perspective.
Even if the Earth has emotions, who are we to assume it would prefer to be covered in throbbing life rather than to have a surface that was burnt to a cinder? Maybe we itch. What we're doing when we talk about a long-term forest recovery is projecting our fantasies about how we would feel if we were the Earth. If we destroy it for ourselves, we've simply destroyed it. We were the ones who assigned value to it.
This is us burning our own house down. The ground that the house is on does not care that we are obviously suicidal.