While refreshing content when a promise is resolved is a useful pattern, Ember routing relies on waiting for promises to resolve before rendering – I don’t think there is one single “Ember way” here.
In many cases, for example when navigating the object graph (say post.comments) in our components, we are forced to deal with async outside of the route hooks.
There was a lot of discussion around this. For those interested, here is an article I wrote not long ago with best practices for dealing with promises in computed properties: The Guide to Promises in Computed Properties - Ember Igniter