It must be more general than that, otherwise the cells wouldn’t be able to repair their area if the damage came from the wrong direction (repair is not center-out).

The model generally learns to generate each pixel from its surroundings, even if the surroundings are partially missing.

There's hidden state in the model which presumably it uses to communicate position, ie there's the 3 colors but then a bunch of other channels that the model can use how it wants.