You could say the same thing about a lot of towns and built-up areas outside the coastal region and valley of California. Paradise was a lot like Weaverville, Shasta, Auburn, Placerville, Georgetown, Clear Lake, South Lake Tahoe, Weed (burned a few years ago), and Big Sur/Malibu. Yeah, most of these places have had fires, or close calls.
The Carr Fire in Redding jumped over the Sacramento river between Shasta Dam and Redding, and burned a bunch of houses there.
There are some issues with the topography here, as in Paradise, which only had the Skyway and 381 to drive down, and a large canyon to the north, with only a small road going down to Covered Bridge.
Things get really dry here, and we have a wet/dry cycle every year, which helps with agriculture. California was planned by gold miners and robber barons using the railroads. They just built where they had to and tore it down as they had to. A lot of the terrain is very steep, or has a grade. There is a real push pull between clearing your land and being accused of aggressively developing spaces that don't belong to you.
In the 1980's, an aggressive expansion of real estate filled in the lots that were left in these places, and with most of the coast already developed and very expensive to build in, the building happened in the foothills. Then it stopped and started, following the busts and booms of the real estate market for thirty five years. People sold along the coast, took their money, and built in the foothills and retired there.
The people who were originally there got pushed out, or joined in on making money out of it. But this had the affect of putting up houses very cheaply and without much lot improvement, which cost money and required permits. So you ended up with a lot of houses built back in the brush, put up on the side of a hill on a stilted foundation, constructed of highly flammable wood, on a small lot covered over 50% by brush.