The air war makes me a bit leery - even assuming Russian capabilities aren't even half what they are on paper they still have capable AWACs support for their SU-35s, etc. as well as their S-300/400 complexes - you can't even send F-16s up against that without superior AWACs datalinks and better stand off range munitions, especially if not giving them a setup and free hand to take the war to Russia in that respect and force them to pull their air support back deeper into Russia.
Yeap, but "non-experts" are busy creaming themselves over the F-16 like its a wonder weapon which will just instantly win the war, just like they did for the TB-2 drone, Javlin, NLAW, HIMARS, Storm Shadow, Challenger 2/Leopard/Abrams and every other bit of western kit we slowly funnel into Ukraine.
These people have NO idea about modern warfare and their 5 second social media based attention span just can't cope with "slow and steady wins the race" in modern peer/peer warfare when in their mind, the offensive should have been a "Rush B Blyat" like Gulf War 1 etc. Thats not how this was ever going to play out and these "wonder weapons" Ukraine is slowly getting would need the full spectrum of NATO/US capability to be fully effective, and as the dribs & drabs of Western kit Ukraine has so far can't be combined into that "full spectrum", they'll never have NATO/US like results. Anyone with even an ounce of military knowledge knows that.
As you mentioned, just giving them F-16's does very little unless they get the rest of the NATO/US airpower force multipliers like tankers, EW, DEAD/SEAD, Rivet Joint, AWACS, JSTARS, because right now this very minute Russia already has all those force multipliers, alongside Fighters with greater range, weapons load, longer ranged missiles etc and Ukraine doesn't. So no, those who think just giving Ukraine a bunch of F-16's will be the single missing piece which turns the tide are wrong, and every-time they say it they jut show their inexperience. Thats not to say F-16's won't be useful in limited situations of course, but people should be very careful with their expectations.
In the end, sadly those screaming loudest about something they've got no clue about, as always, get the most attention and when things don't go the way they expect they have no ability to self reflect and instead want to blame people or become defeated when reality is different to whatever ideas are running wild in their head.