It's very easy to forget to add `require 'rails_helper'` at the top of every core/plugin spec file, and omissions can cause some very confusing/sporadic errors.
By setting this flag in `.rspec`, we can remove the need for `require 'rails_helper'` entirely.
This change both speeds up specs (less strings to allocate) and helps catch
cases where methods in Discourse are mutating inputs.
Overall we will be migrating everything to use #frozen_string_literal: true
it will take a while, but this is the first and safest move in this direction
This updates tests to use latest rails 5 practice
and updates ALL dependencies that could be updated
Performance testing shows that performance has not regressed
if anything it is marginally faster now.
