I agree with Julia's assessment.
It can hard to believe that there was once life without pre-cuts and that "charm" especially as a 5" size is a new thing. Charm used to be a term used to describe when each piece was unique. I do many quilts that would be considered charm as well as many that are considered scrappy, but very few based on a 5" precut.
I'd be looking at that 144 number and breaking it down, for me the minimum number of fabrics I would want would be 12 each for 12 pieces. I prefer typically to be no more than 4 pieces any given fabric, but that's just me. I also look at the fabrics I want to use and make some rough determinations on what I have.
With a fat quarter being roughly 18x22 that would give you 3 rows of 4 = 12. So you would need 12 fat quarters.
Sadly rows don't cut so well, you should be able to get 8 per row. Which would be a row and a half, or that turns into 18 rows to cut the full total with just 8 each.
When I was doing a lot of swapping around Y2K we settled in the 10" block size now known as layer cake as being very convenient for all of us. Cutting 10" squares into 4ths means 36 of them.