We need more than just the information where corrupted pixels are.

For example, consider an image of a woman, severly blurred such that her individual fingers cannot be discerned but you can still see that it's a woman. A "learned" context-aware approach can now deduce that the "blob" that is her hand should be inpainted by fingers. A non-learned approach can't do that.

But the fingers it draws will be random fingers. Not her fingers.

true but it's still pretty amazing that those specific number fluctuations represent fingers (random or otherwise) without training