FWIW The default context window of GPT-4 via ChatGPT is about to change to 32k.
The RoPE embeddings were not "designed" for that. The original RoPE was not designed with length extrapolation in mind. Subsequent tweaks to extrapolate RoPE (e.g. position interpolation) are post-hoc tweaks (with optional tuning) to an entirely vanilla RoPE implementation.
Additionally Apple researchers seem to be playing with "Attention Free" variants.