We don’t need to necessarily protect the trees as they are today. At least in America, the high tree density in our forests is unusual. Historically the forests were sparser and featured larger trees that could survive fires and also kept underbrush down, which prevented big continuous sections of dry fuel. This means small healthy fires took place without need for intervention.
Modern forest management regulation has backfired by making it too hard for land owners to log and thin forests, and at the same time, neither the federal or state governments are doing the job themselves. And so we have dense forests. This has other side effects like increased pestilence, which spreads in dense stands, results in dead trees, which then dry up and turn into fuel. The resulting big fires then keep trees from growing into maturity (“old growth”) and the cycle continues.
Like you, I’m not in favor of unabated giant fires - we need to break that pattern - but once we do, we also need to return the forests to how they were 1-200 years back, when they managed themselves.
See https://youtu.be/O6Vayv9FCLM for a talk by a US Forest Service researcher on this topic.