Many microcontrolers have timers and counters or even state machines (PIOs on RP2040 is a nice example of that) for this reason. They allow you to handle those cases out of the main computing unit. The MSP430s are also full of these magic things. They are harder to get introduced to than just writing Python. But you don't realize how powerful those things are until you step out of how you were handling things on a multi-GHz computer with ton of RAM.
And these peripherals can run at hundreds of MHz doing real work in every cycle. I can probably do very low latency audio processing with an interrupt firing at the sample rate. Delay is a few samples instead of at least couple of ms like on a PC with an audio interface.
You probably could, but I’d recommend getting a chip with a dedicated I2S peripheral and use freertos with a high priority dedicated audio task that’s sole task is processing audio. You really don’t want to miss an audio sample. It’s very audible, and depending on what you’re doing makes audio processing essentially a hard real-time constraint.
