In my opinion largely undeserved, it's a fairly typical short-coupled taildragger that's all.
The reputation (and accident rate, which wasn't a figment of anybody's imagination) in Britain came from it's popularity in the 1980s with first-time homebuilders who'd never flown anything but PA28/C152 variants. So without much training or steeping of taildragger culture, they jumped into them, and routinely scared themselves silly and broke them.
The same type never developed either the reputation or the statistics in the US, where most pilots flying them had graduated from other lightweight taildraggers and had no problem at-all.
Francis Donaldson (PFA's Chief Engineer) advises his builders who haven't much small-taildragger experience before flying a Kitfox to go and get checked out first in a Thruster which is a very twitchy taildragging microlight, on the grounds that after a Thruster TST or T300 the Kitfox is a large, benign-handling machine that'll give them no problems at-all.
G