Web scraping with PowerShell - an empty href - powershell

Question

I am trying to get download links from web pages, but in some web pages some of <a> tags look like this: <a href="#" ....
For example, this page
https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/thankyou.html?standalone=1&system=true&platform=win
has a link with "click here to retry" inner text, which looks like
https://dl.google.com/tag/s/appguid%3D%7B8A69D345-D564-463C-AFF1-A69D9E530F96%7D%26iid%3D%7B3218A264-6918-BBE2-56B1-1CEFAB4A9C43%7D%26lang%3Den%26browser%3D3%26usagestats%3D0%26appname%3DGoogle%2520Chrome%26needsadmin%3Dtrue%26installdataindex%3Ddefaultbrowser/update2/installers/ChromeStandaloneSetup.exe
in any web-browser, but not in PowerShell.
What doesn't work
I tried Invoke-WebRequest:
PS> $url="https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/thankyou.html?standalone=1&system=true&platform=win"
PS> (Invoke-WebRequest $url).Links | ? {$_.InnerText -eq "click here to retry"} | select outerHTML, href | fl
outerHTML : <A class=retry-link href="#" data-g-label="retry-dl"
data-g-event="retry-download">click here to retry</A>
href : #
Other methods - System.Net.WebClient, System.Net.WebRequest + StreamReader - return the same result. I guess it's because they don't process javascripts in web pages, but correct me if I wrong.
Works
Using IE works, all right. But it's SO SLOW and... feels like an overkill. This code does the job:
$url="https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/thankyou.html?standalone=1&system=true&platform=win"
$ie = New-Object -comobject InternetExplorer.Application
$ie.visible = $true
$ie.silent = $true
$ie.Navigate2($url)
while ($ie.busy) { Start-Sleep -m 100 }
while ($ie.Document.readyState -ne 'Complete') { Start-Sleep -m 100 }
$link = $ie.Document.getElementsByTagName("a") | ? { $_.InnerText -eq "click here to retry" } | select -First 1 -expandProperty href
Write-Host $link
Any alternatives?
If you know how to get a proper href values from such links without using IE, please let me know.