Method to direct download "protected" files?

I've found it extremely frustrating that you can't "direct link" to .exe/.msi files - the only ones I actually would use this feature for. I'm wanting to be able to use a public shared link to directly download a file like an EXE or MSI from within a script for easy deployment. I assume there must be something I can append to the URL to request the download? Any chance of something like a REST method to request the file?

Really just wanting this for a simple place to store some installers that would be accessible anywhere and referenced in some scripts to be able to download the file. Anything would work, curl, wget, REST, HTTP, I just a simple way to programmatically download a file from a share link that's already set to "People with the link" without needing to get into API authentication etc.

Hoping there's a simple way??