I'm in a mountainous area of Northern California and we're usually at the longer end of the shutdowns. I think we had a 4-day, a 3-day, plus a few 2-day shutdowns. We use a generator for a few hours in the morning and a few hours in the evening to keep food from spoiling, recharge batteries/phones, watch some tv and surf the interwebs. We have a small battery generator that will charge phones and run a low wattage led lamp overnight. I'm also working on a small solar setup of around 900w. I do think the fires will cause us to leave this area eventually, maybe the state.
Playing the long game, I think PGE is incentivised to be annoying with their shutdowns as a method of pressuring the state to enact legislation which will reduce or remove their liability. Before the recent batch of outages, they were flying all the lines *twice* with a heli to look for downed trees as part of their newly added safety precautions, but the recent outages were so widespread, that became far more expensive, so they're not doing it anymore. Already back to sacrificing safety in favor of economics, same thing they've been doing for decades.