That's interesting. I don't have much experience with it, but when I've seen similar stuff it looked like an anti-pattern to me. Why should developers need to learn your specific wrapper on top of a popular 3rd party component? The internal thing is most likely not documented as well, and common problems don't have answers on Stack Overflow. It requires extra work to use additional features of the library.
I'm similarly wary of convenience libraries that provide marginally simpler APIs on top of standard libraries.
I'm not convinced it's a good idea. I wish I had your experience. Any good reading material?
Wrapping a library in your own concept allows you to define what's right for your application. It has the effect of pushing the third party library out to the edges of your system, replaced with whatever you wrapped it with. This makes replacing it, for testing or any other reason, much easier than if it's proliferated throughout your code unwrapped.
Wrappers should be simple so creating them and documentation, beyond a few integration tests to understand how the library works, shouldn't be a huge concern.
I've been doing a lot of Javascript stuff lately and libraries like Dojo have 5 different ways to locate an element in the DOM. I have no idea if all these ways will be around in a future release, or, right now, which one is better. Unifying the Dom select code behind our own interface keeps things uniform throughout the app, instead of each of us using a different function, and lets us try out the different library functions, or different libraries, easily.
I'm similarly wary of convenience libraries that provide marginally simpler APIs on top of standard libraries.
I'm not convinced it's a good idea. I wish I had your experience. Any good reading material?