When upgrading my 2016 13" MacBook Pro from Sierra 10.12.6 to Monterey, is it best to install all the other MAC os versions in between?

I suggest a clean install rather than trying to upgrade. There have been many significant changes in macOS since Sierra, at least 2 of which are likely to cause headaches if you attempt to upgrade rather than wipe-and-clean-install.

1. Catalina and later versions of macOS require your drive to be reformatted to APFS. In Mojave the macOS upgrade installer could "convert" an HFS+ drive to APFS but that feature may or may not still exist in more recent versions of macOS.
2. Most of your current apps are probably 32-bit apps, which will not run on Catalina or later versions of macOS. You will need to install new (aka 64-bit) versions of your apps.

Before doing anything, however, you should back up all your data to an external drive; better yet to two different external drives.

In principle, you should be able to go directly to Monterey.

However there are firmware updates that get installed along the way. Those should work also, but there is a greater chance (still small) that going in one big step will not work smoothly.

Also, somewhere between Sierra and Catalina, the internal drive will be reconfigured for APFS, versus HFS+. This is handled by the updater but it is another complication.

Because of all this, on an older (2015) iMac I was updating to use, also from Sierra to Monterey, (this was my wife's old iMac, we got her a new one so I adopted the old one) out of an abundance of caution I went stepwise one MacOS at a time, from Sierra to Monterey. It did not take long at all, and went very smoothly.

Before doing this upgrade:

• make sure you have two good, verified backups of everything
• run Disk Utility First Aid to make sure the file system is in good condition
• take note of applications that are 32 bit or for other reasons will no longer run under Monterey. For me this meant upgrading MS-Office immediately, for instance.

Your laptop is a nice model to keep running with its latest MacOS. It has fast Thunderbolt ports and ac WiFi so it should be good to use for a while longer.

A clean install means that you erase the drive and reinstall macOS from scratch. That also means you will need to reinstall all your apps. This guarantees that you have a completely fresh system with nothing left over from the previous install. Upgrade installers do not "wipe and clean install" they just do their upgrade tasks.

That said, try booting your MBP into Recovery Mode and see if Monterey is an available choice for upgrading. If Monterey is available, try installing it. It "should" convert your drive from HFS+ to APFS as part of the installation. If Monterey is not available via Recovery Mode you will need to manually download the Monterey installer and create a bootable installer on a USB flash drive.