For Meteor 2, I’d add peerlibrary:subscription-data as a native way to use Tracker and ReactiveVar under the hood for publishing counts or other derived data.
For Meteor 3, I plan to resurrect that package, which depends on peerlibrary:reactive-publish, which I’ve already revived it here:
On the roadmap I’m adding peerlibrary:subscription-data too, work is in progress for this one.
I hope this will offer a modern option for publishing counts or other derived data soon.