The very first paragraph of this article calls logging 'exploitation' -- a very common view in Santa Cruz County, and also a very hypocritical one depending on the proponent, considering the fact that the very same early 20th Century cabins everywhere present in San Lorenzo Valley were themselves commonly framed and sheathed with redwood logged from the SC Mountains.

The damage from the CZU fires was certainly intensified by man-made decisions, and most of these a result of the anti-development turn Santa Cruz County took after the late 1970s.

Two very simple and straightforward solutions to mitigate destructive wildfires in the SC Mountains are to 1) allow logging, and 2) stop favoring existing homes over new homes when it comes to fire resistant requirements.

One of the reasons Santa Cruz County (or California) is in the state it's in is people don't want to hear this.

Logging:
There are tens of thousands of acres of TP (Timber Production) zoned land in the Santa Cruz Mountains -- very much in areas that burned -- that have been blocked from logging due to years and years of environmental reviews and neighbor complaints.
These lands could have just simply been logged.
There would have been healthy trees left (clear-cutting is illegal) and overall the forest would have been in a much better state to resist fires.
Also, Santa Cruz County unfortunately allows single family homes on TP-zoned parcels.
So there are lots of TP-zoned parcels that will never be logged as they are really now residential lots in disguise.
This does not help forest management at all.

Fire resistant requirements:
I'm one of the few people I know that has actually built a new house on raw land in the Santa Cruz Mountains in the last 10 years.
It took me nearly 3 years for permits alone for an 1100 sq ft single story SFH built on flat ground near a public highway.
This type of timeframe dissuades most people from new construction here.
This is on purpose: it's what the county and people in the county want.

The actual Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) building codes are very straightforward and increase the cost of construction by only about 10 percent.
Class A shingles, Type X gypsum underlayment everywhere, approved fire resistant siding, fire+ember/resistant vents, tempered fire resistant windows/shutters, indoor sprinkler system, vegetation clearance everywhere.
It was all required (and inspected) for me to legally move in.

None of my neighbors in their 1930s/1940s homes are remotely as fire ready. Remotely. Lots of the homes that burned in the CZU fires were pretty distant from the fire line. All it took was floating embers setting shrubs on fire, and those shrubs burning and getting embers sucked into a vent, and many a house became a tinderbox.

Yet my neighbors can sell their homes -- and there is a decent amount of home sales up here still -- and not have to upgrade a single thing.

Since wildfires don't care about whether a house has been standing 1 year or 100 years, this is obviously driven by politics and not fire safety.

There was a state law passed in 2021 that mandated that any home located in a State Responsibility Area Fire Severity Zone of High or Very High get a fire safety inspection and approval (for vegetation clearance) before an existing home sale. Updated 2022 CalFire maps have classified a good amount of homes in the Santa Cruz Mountains as High or Very High, so the updated maps becoming legally binding will be a good first start.

But it's a small start.