Brick does tend to survive. Brick as an insulating layer can save lives. Brick also explodes violently under conditions where wood merely burns. Neither of these save homes in our wildfires, though; it turns out what saves homes is things no one realized at first:
Don’t plant trees within fifty feet of a structure. More, if you didn’t inflate your home like a balloon to fill a property to the brim with home. Cut them down and make a firebreak. Clearings exist for a real and serious reason. Aesthetics have been given precedence far too long in this regard.
Make your home airtight (or positively pressurize it, if you have the power and tech to do that safely) so that embers don’t get pushed in by the winds and pulled in by the temperature differential currents and catch your house on fire from inside its walls. Not much fun in having a brick building burned out from embers that were forced in through a poorly-sealed door.
Saturate your roof with water, so that it doesn’t trap embers and act as a fire repeater to the next house on the block. Not only will your roof not burn, but every ember that lands on it will likely go out. Even if your roof is metal, consider installing sprinklers anyways. Maybe you’ll help save your neighborhood someday.
It’s not the building material that’s the one problem here; it’s the carelessness of building code, safety enforcement and absence of federal and state aid to fireproof homes in known fire zones. It’s the catastrophically incorrect hundred year old policy that would rather burn down a chunk of homes every ten years rather than admit that policy is wrong and that the indigenous people were right all along. Brick or wood or concrete or steel, none of these will stop the hottest fires with any certainty. We know what does, and we’ve allowed it to become unsafe to have wood homes. We know how to stop these wildfires. Build with brick if you like, but:
Only fire can prevent forest fires.