jQuery absolutely will trigger native click elements.
The issue here is that some browsers, like Chrome, try to protect users against download / pop-up spam by detecting multiple fake clicks and ignoring them.
The most common strategy for dealing with this is to zip up the files and send them as a single download
A quick google for actually doing it as mutiple downloads reveals many different stragies (synthetic clicks, synthetic clicks with timeouts, iframes, pop-up windows, window.location) all with comments saying it doesn’t work anymore.
It seems that browsers are actively chasing the workarounds and stopping them from working shortly after they are discovered.
So I personally wouldn’t bother trying
No idea how to do it with CollectionFS sorry.
I’d probably write a server route that accepts file IDs, grabs them from CFS, zips them up and sends them back to the client
Looking at where that function is used in event/trigger.js it looks like it doesn’t use native events anyway (except the special case of a checkbox), just gets the jQuery handlers out of private data and runs them