We present new bounds on the existence of general quantum maximum distance separable codes (QMDS): the length $n$ of all QMDS codes with local dimension $D$ and distance $d \geq 3$ is bounded by $n \leq D^2 + d - 2$. We obtain their weight distribution and present additional bounds that arise from Rains' shadow inequalities. Our main result can be seen as a generalization of bounds that are known for the two special cases of stabilizer QMDS codes and absolutely maximally entangled states, and confirms the quantum MDS conjecture in the special case of distance-three codes. As the existence of QMDS codes is linked to that of highly entangled subspaces (in which every vector has uniform $r$-body marginals) of maximal dimension, our methods directly carry over to address questions in multipartite entanglement.