Right. Loma Prieta was pretty serious, particularly closer to the epicenter (and as I recall, damage sort of hopped and skipped among geologically unstable landforms for quite some distance). But it was less than 1/10th as powerful as the 1906 quake.

And yes, M9s are monsters -- the Boxing Day and March 11 earthquakes in Indonesia and Japan were both M9s, I believe there was one in Chile ... ok, that was 1960 -- the 1964 Prince William Sound, Alaska, quake was also 9+. Listing at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes

On the US West Coast, it's the Oregon / Washington coast which would be most likely to see a quake of that magnitude, along the Cascadia fault, a megathrust fault which could produce similarly large tsunamis as well as massive shaking. For most of California, not so much.