The lack of context does make it impossible to definitely rule out a number of candidates. If most native English speakers were forced to bet $1 million dollars

The lack of context does make it impossible to definitely rule out a number of candidates. If most native English speakers were forced to bet $1 million dollars and guess at the missing word written by an unknown author without further clues, I think most would seriously consider only 0.01% of words they know as a possibility. BERT and similar models do consider a wider context window (up to 1000 lemmas if I recall correctly), which is a reason they do quite well when trying to fill in blanks for a complete passage and usually less accurately for shorter texts.