requests/api/project_spec.rb speed up

**What does this MR do?**
It improves the speed of the `request/api/project_spec.rb` tests by ~3 minutes. It also removes some test duplication, and moves some assertions into the same tests so another API call is not needed.

**Before:** `~3.51 min`
**After:** `~ 50 sec.`
I think the style that was present before is preferred. If you want to only evaluate the `before` once to speed things up and check a bunch of things, use `before(:all)` instead of the `before(:each)` that's implied. As much as possible I think we should only assert one thing per `it` block.