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You can run VM's on 2016 Standard but you need to do the math for when you need to move Data Center based on cost.

When you license all the cores on a 2016 Host with Standard, you cover the base OS install and 2 VM's. So when you add another VM or two you have to license all the core's again with Standard. You keep repeating this for every 2 VM's. So a 16 core hosts with 4 VM's needs 32 cores of licenses, 6 VM's need 48 cores. Once you do the delta of the cost between Standard to Data Center cores you can see where you break even and when it makes more sense to move to Data Center. This was a play to drive you right to Data Center even for a few VM's.

Where I work we license Data Center since we are Windows heavy and average 30/40 VM's on a host, it's "cheaper" to run Data Center in this model.

We were not happy about this "core tax" .. I guess socket costs staying stale for a while and core counts helping servers being able to run 30,40,60 VM's per host. MS saw this as lost revenue and say $$$ signs.