As per @ncoghlan's filing of devassistant/devassistant#388, the normalisation of the dashes in the project name shouldn't happen automatically—as opposed to the Python package name, which must be normalised in any case.
A brief look at the PyPI suggests that both normalised and non-normalised project names are used plentifully, so I suggest fulfilling the request if no opposition is recorded. It occurred to me that adding an argument to normalise the project name could also be an option, but on second thought it doesn't make sense because the very occurrence of inappropriate characters in the name is probably unintentional, making it unlikely that the user would ever select it.
Comments from @hroncok and @bkabrda?