Food for thought: this year's wildfire season, for all of the West Coast, has burned 5 million acres so far. Or, approximately the minimum prehistoric California wildfire season.
The fire that destroyed my neighborhood started as a 100-acre controlled burn with 4 firefighters. Say you've got 180 days to do controlled burns, because the other 180 days you're fighting forest fires. You've got 5 million acres to burn in a controlled fashion. That's 28,000 acres per day. At 25 acres per firefighter you're looking at a minimum of a thousand full-time firefighters... except that it takes about 5 days to prep for a controlled burn that size. So... five thousand firefighters.
Instead we've got 16,000 firefighters called in from all over the country trying to keep wildfires under control.