Belated reply to tell you that yes, this was a very good explanation, thank you! And it showed me how little I know about trees in the first place. :/
(I have noticed a thing with our street trees here, they seem to lose their leaves extremely early and I wonder if that's also because of all the salt people use as soon as there are five snowflakes on the sidewalk?)

From what you described, it looks like the power companies *could* prune trees in ways that were more efficient as well as easier to endure for the tree, but it's probably a time & money factor -- people would have to be able to assess the situation beyond "make tree shorter", depending on how you'd have to cut it may also be more difficult to do, and what power company would want to put that much effort into it? :(