Would also like to note that the Template being on 4.16 in master already was a mistake, I ran into some engine bugs in 4.16 that I wanted to track down and report and merged it early by accident.
Normally my procedure is to keep the new engine version in a separate branch until it is released and then merge it into master for the template.
The plugin repository itself is still currently on 4.15 for master with a 4.16 alpha branch as is the intended workflow.