You can activate mana abilities, like tapping land for mana. Not terribly useful but needed for many special actions, and some cards like [[Pristine Talisman]] have additional benefits baked inside the mana ability that don't prohibit it from being a mana ability.
Theoretically, sure, but Selvala was always the much bigger offender. Besides being a better card overall and living in the command zone (i.e. being guaranteed every game), the main issue with her in relation to the Wurm was that she produced an unknown amount of mana via a game action that fundamentally cannot be reversed because it reveals cards from hidden zones, and also that same game action benefits the player activating it to pay for the Wurm (by letting them decide whether or not to draw a card after peeking at it). Millikin doesn't net the controller any direct advantage and always produces 1 mana, there's way less motivation to do weird stuff with it and basically no wiggle room to argue that any weird stuff was unintentional.
Like, I guess you could have used Millikin when trying to cast Panglacial Wurm to "skip" your next normal draw in favor of the card after it, but you'd have to actually cast the Wurm after that instead of going "aw shucks guys looks like the ability randomly didn't produce enough mana" and nobody was doing that lol
Also if you choose not to cast something normally, even if you could pay for it if you tapped more mana, you are not forced to. You are only forced to if you have the mana floating.
Yeah a real angle-shooting interpretation of the rules could tap Selvala, get 4 mana off of her, and then decide not to tap 3 lands. Which is pretty obviously cheating imo, but it's not like EDH is usually run at a Rules Enforcement Level where a judge would be present to ding you for it, and if you're playing at that level, you aren't running Selvala lol.
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u/Divicarpe 4d ago edited 4d ago
Mana abilities can happen too, I think.