It's something even more fundamental than all that.
If someone does a prescribed burn (say, a local government), and it gets even slightly out of control and accidentally burns down a few homes, they will immediately face a huge amount of blame and consequences and probably get run out on a rail. But if they don't do a prescribed burn and then the inevitable wildfire burns down a bunch of homes, well then, tough luck. That's just an unlucky act of god.
Doesn't a controlled burn work by removing a swath of combustible material, so that a subsequent fire cannot cross that area? That material can be removed by other means that don't risk fire.
Yes that's exactly the idea. And yes those "other means" sometimes exist, but they tend to be much more expensive than controlled burns. The amount of person-power and time needed to remove that material manually would be cost-prohibitive.
And that's assuming other methods even exist. Much of the fuel that needs to be removed is in places where there are no roads, so the only way to remove that fuel would be hundreds or thousands of individual helicopter trips. No government is going to pay for that.
EDIT: Methods like tree thinning are manual methods and they are done routinely and they help. But they cannot take the place of controlled burns for removing large amounts of fuel and creating big fire breaks.
"Cannot" is a strong word. Fires smoulder for a long time and you cannot control the wind. It would be foolish to expect a prescribed burn to have zero chance of causing collateral damage.
If someone does a prescribed burn (say, a local government), and it gets even slightly out of control and accidentally burns down a few homes, they will immediately face a huge amount of blame and consequences and probably get run out on a rail. But if they don't do a prescribed burn and then the inevitable wildfire burns down a bunch of homes, well then, tough luck. That's just an unlucky act of god.
Ultimately it's a trolley problem.