It appears when I transition from 1 slug to another the page content reloads but there is no option that I can see to make it transition as any other route change would.
There was an issue here on vue-router which has the old and new solution. It seems it'd be good to have a configurable key for the router-vue component.
https://github.com/vuejs/vue-router/issues/474
Maybe this could be done within layout components and we could add the key attribute optionally to the nuxt component? Maybe even a quick config option in the nuxt config to set whether transitions should always be applied? I think the attribute way would be good enough though. That way the transition application can be conditional.