In principle, you should be able to go directly to Monterey.
However there are firmware updates that get installed along the way. Those should work also, but there is a greater chance (still small) that going in one big step will not work smoothly.
Also, somewhere between Sierra and Catalina, the internal drive will be reconfigured for APFS, versus HFS+. This is handled by the updater but it is another complication.
Because of all this, on an older (2015) iMac I was updating to use, also from Sierra to Monterey, (this was my wife's old iMac, we got her a new one so I adopted the old one) out of an abundance of caution I went stepwise one MacOS at a time, from Sierra to Monterey. It did not take long at all, and went very smoothly.
Before doing this upgrade:
- make sure you have two good, verified backups of everything
- run Disk Utility First Aid to make sure the file system is in good condition
- take note of applications that are 32 bit or for other reasons will no longer run under Monterey. For me this meant upgrading MS-Office immediately, for instance.
Your laptop is a nice model to keep running with its latest MacOS. It has fast Thunderbolt ports and ac WiFi so it should be good to use for a while longer.