Can ionic v6 used with react v16

My frontend system is using ionic framework v5 with react v16.
Due to recent issue relating to popover api on new v114 release of chrome, we are considering upgrade ionic to v6.
But to do that, it states that react must be updated to v17+, that we don’t want to do because a huge source change is needed.
Can we just upgrade to ionic-core v6 and keep using react v16?