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Agreed. Mental stats are the unfortunate place where the fantasy of "you can be anyone" runs up against the reality of your real life "mental stats." It's not something you scream from the rooftops, but d&d is a cooperative roleplaying game, and your ability to depict the character you're playing matters. It's easy to abstract away swinging an axe or doing a fearsome war cry to the dice if you can't do those things but your character can. Coming up with a cunning plan or smooth-talking through an encounter... not as much.
The unfortunate result is that someone who freezes up when put on the spot simply cannot roleplay a suave rogue or bard as well as someone who can. Same goes for someone who, like you said, plays a 20 INT Wizard but can't memorize their spells. It's not like you need to be Bond or Einstein to play these characters — you just need to be able to approximate it well enough out of character that the other players can let their imaginations do the rest.
You could abstract things away to rolls like you said, but I find campaigns where that is the norm to be less engaged. If I have a bard as a player, I expect the player to be cracking wise and making rousing speeches instead of saying "I make a joke" or "I make a speech."
A lot of DMs expect players to actually come up with a motivational speech (or whatever) for their character to say, rather than rolling a die. But I think that's unreasonable. I don't ask the fighter to tell me in detail what sword form he uses to counter the enemy's defenses. I also don't ask the CHA character to actually have a silver tongue.
So yeah, I don't personally think there's a problem with abstracting mental stats behind die rolls. You use the same abstraction as for everything else, and don't impose harsh "your character can't do anything you can't" rules on only one aspect of the game.
How about "prior to rolling a die"? The role-playing is what makes TTRPGs better than computer games! If I'm DMing for my 10 year old, I'm not expecting a soliloquy that would sway royalty, but an argument that's especially good for a 10 year old might be worth a bonus to the subsequent Charisma roll, and one that's clearly just phoned in might be worth a penalty.
For young kids (this happened when one was 6, IIRC?) I've even gone so far as to say "make a Wisdom check" upon hearing a course of action that was likely to get the party killed, and when it passed I took that as an excuse to recount every line of reasoning that character would understand about why they're endangering themselves, though the final decision was out of my hands still. A bit of a cheat, I admit, since even a failure would have raised the question of "wait, why did daddy just ask for that" and so would have been a huge clue itself...
Nobody's yet given me the opposite problem. It turns out that the same sort of player who will min-max a low-Wis barbarian is also the same sort of player who will happily charge recklessly into danger rather than try to employ higher player wisdom. Not sure if that was intentional role-playing or a lack of higher player wisdom, but it was at least consistent and fun!
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The reason you ask for the player to roleplay his speech but not to describe his sword swing technique is because D&D is a game that exists in our heads. It is a real as the group believes it to be. That is to say, it can be very real, but this requires collective suspension of disbelief, engagement, buy-in, and yes — roleplaying. You aren't taken out of the collective fantasy by your fighter's player not knowing how to swing a sword, but you are by the player who is supposedly the high Charisma party face clamming up whenever an NPC speaks to him.
I don't have an issue with such players being at my table, and in my experience they tend to avoid those kinds of characters anyway. You don't need a silver tongue to be able to play a charismatic character, but you need to have some degree of wit and charm. If a player wants to give a speech, I'm not exactly expecting St. Crispin's Day, but he should have something to say.
Would you accept it if the player spoke in abstract about the themes his character is talking about, the buttons he tries to press, etc. without actually reciting it in first person?
Sure, especially if the player is less comfortable speaking in first person, or is performing something like a song that would take a long time to devise. I have a preference to first person roleplaying, but in the kind of example you gave the player is clearly demonstrating engagement and knowledge of what's going on, so it's all good to me. I take umbrage more with doing away with all of that and just rolling the dice in social situations.
Think "my character sings a song" vs "my character sings this folk song with specific themes that he uses to subtly mock the hostile lord."
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That's my preferred method. "I try to persuade the king to spare the captive by appealing to his sense of justice/diplomacy/humour/whatever." It's like how you don't just "attack", you attack with a weapon.
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