SP on-premises auth to use REST API?

Hi folks, 

We actually have a SharePoint 2016 on-premises where authentication relies on NTLM for our Intranet organization.

We plan to develop a mobile application (with NativeScript (JavaScript)) that would need to retrieve and send data from and to our on-prem SharePoint. Unfortunatelly it looks like NTLM authenticating isn't that easy.

I've seen that we could integrate our on-premises SharePoint to Azure AD. Would it then allow us to authenticate our Active Directory users and use SharePoint 2016 on-premises Rest API?

Thank you for reading, and any help is appreciate since we cannot find any solution at this moment.