Full refresh defeats the purpose of a spa unfortunately. I just tested that event and it actually doesn't appear to fire when navigating backwards, only when the page is initially shown...which contradicts the comments in that code.
Maybe you misunderstand the original issue. This is when navigating back to a "new" page, not internally in a SPA. But this issue mainly happens when navigating back to a page with dynamic behavior (typically a SPA or other interactive application).
Can force a refresh when the page us navigated back to. Or use that event to fix whatever state your in.