Completely totally and utterly delete a project

I completely deleted a project using General → Advanced, call it “project_x”

But then I wanted to create a project with exactly the same name

$ git push --set-upstream https://gitlab.com/mrodent/project_x.git master

Username for 'https://gitlab.com': mrodent

Password for 'https://mrodent@gitlab.com':

remote: You are not allowed to push code to this project.

fatal: unable to access 'https://gitlab.com/mrodent/project_x.git/': The requested URL returned error: 403

Then I created a project called “project_x2”. This was created (at GitLab) and pushed to with the above command.

Then I deleted “project_x2” as well. Trying to recreate that immediately I got the above 403 response.

I thought maybe it takes a certain time for a deletion of a project to “settle in”. So I waited for about 10 hours.

I just tried creating “project_x” and then “project_x2” again. 403 in both cases. I am now able to create “project_x3”.

Clearly this deletion is not happening properly, which is annoying. Can someone explain how I actually totally and utterly delete a project from GitLab?