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Bart,
The difference the bit depth will make is in terms of limiting how many photons you can count in each pixel. A 12 bit sensor can count no more than 4096 (at unit gain), regardless of the theoretical well depth of the sensor, before it "saturates".
But that said, you can simply take more shorter shots instead to avoid saturating the counter/well in each sub in order to get the same total exposure time.
The downside of taking more shorter shots is that you get more read noise for the same total exposure time. But if your exposures are long enough to be sky limited, all is good. And the CMOS sensors tend to have such low read noise that the time to get sky limited is quite short - at least under light pollution!! There is plenty of discussion on IIS regarding finding sky limited exposure times (or gimme a call!).
I use a 12 bit camera (ZWO 1600MM-C) and seems to work fine. Obviously higher bit width would give you more flexibility if you wanted to do longer subs for some reason, but bottom line is the 12 bit one works fine IMHO.
Paul
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