Some of the dumb enviromental laws didn't help either. It could be pretty hard to clear trees from a legal perspective, which made maintenance more expensive and time consuming, leading to grid degradation.
Even if thats true, they wouldn't have though. The neglect of infrastructure by pg&e is pretty much classic corruption and profit extraction. In a different universe where pg&e isnt a terrible organization protected by political corruption, sure maybe but we don't live in that world sadly.
tree clearing regs are true but irrelevant to OPs point about renewables.