Avoiding the deferred anti-pattern [duplicate]

Answer 1

Deferred anti-pattern happens when new redundant deferred object is created to be resolved from inside an promise chain.

In your case you already have a Promise object, so you just need to return doSomethingAsync() result:

function foo() {
    return doSomethingAsync().then(function (result) {
        return doSomethingToTheResult(result);
    });
};

Would the above ensure that the transformed result is used further down the promise chain?

Yes, exactly, this is one of the coolest things about promises.