Well, if I remember my grade school grammar, it’s not a matter of the imperative verb, it’s an issue of direct vs. indirect object. English is full of finer points (like “a” vs “an” discussed -once again- in a recent thread) that are intended to reduce dissonance or ambiguity. It’s all usually more a matter of style than hard grammar: the more skilled the speaker, the better they should be able to match their usage to their intended audience.
If we compare English to Latin … no, better, German, since English is a Germanic, not Romance, language-- Modern English lacks a well defined dative case. The dative usage survives, but without any clear overt signifiers. English has no (distinctive) dative pronouns like the German “mir”, only a degenerate use of the objective “me” (which in German is the distinct word “mich”). Modern English articles are even more degenerate – essentially completely degenerate-- not only are there no dative articles (like German “meinem” or “meiner”) to indicate indirect objects, but there are no subjective objective or genitive (possessive) articles.
Indeed, many regional and ethnic dialects of English have characteristic usage patterns that seem awkward in the mainstream “mixing pot” ear. The Pennsylvania “Dutch” (an American corruption of “Deutsch” – since the PD are actually, of German extraction, not from the Netherlands or another “Low Country”) were well known for saying things like “throw the woman out the window a stick of wood”, which create brief incongruous juxtapositions in the mind of those who were raised only on a language without dative markers
if I say “Could you recommend me a banker”, word order (and context) suggest that “me” is an indirect object, but since we hear “recommend me” briefly before hearing “a banker”, it causes a brief dissonance, and many speakers would automatically avoid that by saying “Could you recommend a banker?” instead, after decades of experience with using the verb “to recommend”.
Word order is a cue, but as in “throw the old lady”, it’s often an awkward one. Context is. oddly, a weaker cue than word order: we may think that we use context to sort out “throw the old lady out the window a stick”, but we really don’t. If I testify in a harassment case: “The director recommended the intern a project team”, and later “the director recommended a project team the intern” most native speakers would say that the former indicated tha tthe director made the suggestion to the intern [who then decided] while the latter indicated that the director made the recommendation to the project team [who then decided] Few people would argue strongly that either sentence could be interpreted either way or that both meant the same thing. The truth of each sentence is independent of the other (e.g. both false, if the director made no recommendation, only one true if he only made one recommendation, or both true if he made two)