Open ajax dialog with JavaScript

By adding use-ajax to a link we can open a modal using the Drupal ajax library as per the docs.

E.g.

<a class="use-ajax" 
    data-dialog-options="{&quot;width&quot;:400}" 
    data-dialog-type="modal" 
    href="/node/1">
    First article displayed in modal dialog.
</a>

This will use the ajax library to fetch node/1 and then display it in a modal.

There is also a Dialog API for JavaScript which allows opening modals using JavaScript.

E.g.

var myDialog  = Drupal.dialog(ADOMElement, settings);
myDialog.show();

The problem with this API is you need to pass in a existing DOM element.

My question is can I trigger opening a modal with JavaScript and utalise the internal Drupal ajax library to actually fetch the content?

E.g Can I do something like this?

var myDialog  = Drupal.dialog('/node/1', {useAjax: true});
myDialog.show();

I could just create an html link as per my first code block, hide it with css, and then trigger a click on it with JS but this seems a bit hacky - there must be a way to trigger this action using pure JS.