yes, i had lots of mods, some of them for simple QoL, but quite a few to add tiles, eg alien biomes, asphalt roads, dectorio, and also several that at least optically add more tiles (i don't know how they are implemented and whether their latest versions really add many tile types) like AAI zones, textplates, more_colors and more_floors (not yet enabled for 0.16), etc.
in the meantime, i have followed the link to the discussion with posila and i understand the cause of such problems. but it would be nice if mods wouldn't simply give some (for most users) meaningless or misleading error messages and force a restart after disabling all related mods (hehe, i still remember old versions of factorio when factorio only terminated and i myself had to delete mods and/or edit json files to disable them), but instead mods would directly disable themselves, reduce the number of new tiles for a limited usability, or in this case give a message like "too many tile types (>255) while trying to add another 5675 new types".
is there some method to check how many new tiles some mod introduces without the need to dig deep into their source?