Interesting. Our (Rails) codebase is around 25,000 tests and less than half have a single assertion. Personally, there's some calculus in my head when I'm writing a test that determines if/when the scenario I'm testing needs multiple assertions.
rspec or minitest? ;-) Could rspecs 'expect change' idiom be the difference?
I find that reducing assertions per spec where I can a good guideline. E.g. combining expect(foo['a']).to eq(1) and expect(foo['b']).to eq(2) into expect(foo).to include('a' => 1, 'b' => 2)
yields better error messages.