It's worth noting that idolatry is also prohibited in the Ten Commandments, and that it seems to have been poorly enforced throughout Christianity. But why?

The history of Christianity is one of amalgamation and adoption of older traditions from the pagus, in the northern Mainland of Europe and the British Isles (far more my speciality than Southern Europe) this particularly includes Wotanic personifications of natural phenomena and the long-held pagan traditions of celebrating life and death, dark and light, east and west, the seasons, and natural phenomena. The term "pagan" is often associated with modern druidism, unlearned yokels, occultism, dark worship, and so on. When I refer to paganism here I will simply be talking about ritual or religious beliefs that are particularly non-Christian.

Through this established view of Pagans .vs. Christians we're conditioned to see a gulf of differences when in fact there are more commonalities than there are differences.

Christian conversion was very much a process of revisionism - people learned that the things they had always believed were still correct, it was just that the story was a bit wrong. For this reason Christian teachings also personify miraculous life-giving abilities bound to distinguishable characters (often mortal) while still revering the Ostre (fertility of the East and sunrise), lightness and darkness, seasonal rural activities, and so on.

Christian architecture even came to ape arboreal forms in its tracery, and adopted the four stations of the world (N, E, S, W) as central philosophy for its buildings. Such astronomically-aware alignments can be seen in ritual structures going back thousands of years. It was therefore natural that other traits like personification of phenomena would also continue - people were used to associating their beliefs with characters and the Christian church deliberately capitalised on this. In fact they were even instructed to do so by figures such as Pope Gregory.

One could argue that "bad" pagan attributes perpetuated in the Church because rather than coming from separate strand of development the Christian church's development was very much an intertwined evolution of the same ideas.

Sources:

Lollards and Images: The Defence of Religious Art in Later Medieval England, Jones W R, 1973

Stations of the Sun, Hutton R, 1996

Pagan Religions of the British Isles, Hutton R, 1993

Idolatry in the New Testament, Marcus J, 2006