I fear, the problem isn't clearly specified. What do you exactly mean with "protect the microcontroller"?
In many designs, isolation between control circuit (e.g. microcprocessor) and DC bus is required. Of course, isolation involves protection against damage by a defective power stage, but that's not it's primary purpose.
If the control circuit is not isolated from DC bus, in other words both are powered by the same supply, opto couplers make no sense. Series resistors and clamp diodes would be sufficient to protect the control circuit against overvoltage feed back from the power stage.
The other aspect that comes into play is highside driver isolation. If an optocoupler is used for control circuit isolation, it might also povide the highside isolation. Driver power supply concept and required gate current are also determining the design.
Fast optocouplers and optoisolated gate drivers are available with different speed and respective delay skew. State-of-the-art optoisolated gate drivers have a maximum delay skew down to 100 ns, logic level couplers several 10 ns.