The ultility companies weren't allowed to cut down dead trees and remove the sort of dead brush that goes up like tinder. How much that did or did not contribute to wild fires I guess we could argue, but it sure doesn't look good. Also, literally forbidding fire trucks from other states to come offer assistance once the fires started because of Calif emission standards is, well, borderline insane. Which they did do.
OTOH, blaming the CA gov for stuff like the flash floods is probably a bit too far. That could likely happen anywhere. But people on the wrong end of hurricanes or tornadoes were not remotely put there due to government malfeasance.
I don't want to power level too much, but I have a little bit or insider knowledge about the utility forestry industry in general, and a smaller amount about that of California in particular. So please allow me to share.
On the first hand, California is a particularly challenging place to manage trees near power lines. The long growing season and heavy winter rains mean that trees grow very fast; the long, dry summers mean that they're very combustible; and the extremely rugged and remote terrain of large parts of the state means that getting to trees to trim or remove them can be unusually difficult compared to doing the same thing in, say, Illinois. So CA's utilities definitely have their work cut out for them, but there are other states in the Union- e.g. Florida with its constant hurricanes- who manage to solve similarly challenging problems set by Mother Nature with a certain level of reliable professionalism.
On the second hand, the government of California has put in place all manner of regulations that make the tasks of utilities more difficult. Some of these were genuinely well-intentione. For instance, back in the day, utilities would clear tall brush under their lines by performing controlled burns of the vegetation on their right-of-ways, which was both cheap and effective. But the grim, lung-destroying smogs of the '60s and '70s caused the state government to strictly limit the amount of smoke-producing fires landowners could set. Understandable, and the air in LA and Sacramento is genuinely way, way better than it used to be, but you'd think that in the wake of fire after fire after fire the government would relent some and let landowners cook. Of course not. And there's other regulations - innumerable orher regulations - that have much weaker justification than that, but which still will not be waived.
And on the mutant third hand, the electric utilities in California have a certain reputation for corruption. Now, I want to be careful with my words here, because my interactions with utility forestry people in California have generally shown them to be at
least as professional and competent as people in the industry in other states, and I've seen systems out east get away with things that would never, ever fly in California, saved purely by how much less fire prone the forests in the humid east are. But there are persistent rumors of corruption in upper management in some of these utilities that are on a whole other level from the kind of ordinary corruption that one hears of elsewhere. For instance - and this is just a rumor, but it is a rumor told to me by someone who was absolutely in a position to know - some people with authority over a certain utility 's forestry division deliberately worked to cut down as few trees as possible so that, when they left and switched over to a tree trimming company, there would be mountains upon mountains of work to bill the utility for. Again, I can’t swear to the truth of this particular story, but I can say that one hears stories like this from California more frequently than from elsewhere.
In short, California was dealt a very difficult hand by nature, and she's since managed to play the hand she was dealt very, very poorly, in a way that transcends simple "big government vs big business" binaries and that ends up making everyone look awful. But not as awful looking as the corpses of the people burned to death in the wildfires caused by all this!