Difficulty – What is the largest possible target value?

Here the largest possible target value (maximum target value) is:

0x00000000FFFF0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

The Bitcoin wiki also mentions the same value as the highest possible target.

This is the target value for the genesis block and the first 2016 blocks.

I’m curious why this is the largest (maximum) target value. Is that one of the consensus rules? So the target value can increase/decrease depending on the current hashrate, but it must be less than the given value?