Ember Modals - Toggle and best way to structure

Your best bet would be to make component-a completely responsible for toggling the modal. So instead you should pass the toggleModal action to the model-element:

{{modal-element closeAction=(action 'toggleModal')}}

Now model-element only needs to trigger the given action:

actions: {
  onCloseButtonClicked() {
    if (this.get('closeAction')) {
      this.get('closeAction')();
    }
  }
}