I certainly feel your pain.
In my first response I included this link Where should I define a “save” action where a long discussion took place on where to put certain actions: in the controller or the route.
But nowhere did they talk about the difficulty of referencing an action in the route from a component, which stuck me as odd, given the emphasis on using components.
It seems like there should be a simple, well-documented way to do this, but unfortunately the two of us seem to be missing it. And even though it could be (probably is) our fault, I think it should raise a concern to the ember documentation folks that something this important can’t be figured out by newbies. (And I don’t mean to disparage them; they do a tremendous job on a difficult task on their own time for no pay - something few people are willing to do.)
Maybe someone with more smarts will show us the light. 