For posterity:
The problem you were encountering that none of the responders were clocking is that browsers are very opinionated about click events now. As part of preventing CSRF attacks, click events can only come from 1) a user action, 2) the debug console, or 3) fired from an onclick handler (eg, make a custom file upload button click the real button).
This happened about 10 years ago on some browsers and followed quickly to the rest.
And it’s why triggering it purely from the client side ended up working for you, and fiddling around in the console, but not a single one of the other suggestions did.