Markdown Meaningful Word Count - a status bar contribution that reports out the meaningful number of words in a Markdown document as you interact with it.
Installation
Launch VS Code Quick Open (Ctrl+P), paste the following command, and press enter.
It's pretty simple. Open up a Markdown file and the status bar will have an auto-updating word-count in it. The extension ignores all punctuation marks and returns a 'true', meaningful word count.