I did not try the encapsulation, since my code (since 2008) references GDAL directly. I just replaced the external GDAL library with the Upp GDAL plugin to get rid of the bloated DLL and to ease compilation of GDAL. (To be more specific, the executable grew by about 2 MB while I was able to drop the 7 MB DLL.
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It seems the encapsulation is for the raster part, while I also use the vector part (OGR). When I get some time, I could look at the raster encapsulation and test how it works.
The vector part (OGR) obviously needs the corresponding driver registrations. Encapsulation for OGR would be quite different.