EDIT: Based on a critical edit to your question: Yeah, sums of Likert items do not have a Likert distribution. Thanks to the Central Limit Theorem they have an approximately normal distribution. Approximately normal data are pretty soundly in ANOVA's bailiwick, (the more items contributing to your outcome variable, the more comfortable with ANOVA you should be), though you will still need to make appropriate corrections for unequal variances between groups.
If the number of Likert-scale items contributing to your variable is small, you might want to use the Kruskal-Wallis test instead. There will be a small hit to statistical power (as compared with ANOVA) using Kruskal-Wallis with approximately normal data, but you should be able to use either.
The Kruskal-Wallis test assumes the outcome data measured across $C$ groups are measured continuously. I.e., from their original paper "If the samples come from identical continuous populations, and the $n_{i}$ are not too small, $H$ is distributed as $\chi^{2}(C-1)$…" ($H$ is the Kruskal-Wallis test statistic, and the $n_{i}$s are the sample sizes in each group.)
The same is true of the Mann-Whitney(-Wilcoxon) rank sum test between two samples—which the Kruskal-Wallis test is effectively a $C$ sample extension of—where Mann & Whitney's first sentence is "Let $x$ and $y$ be two random variables with continuous cumulative distribution functions $f$ and $g$."
Unfortunately, this means that the inferential properties based on the distribution of the $H$ test statistic may be invalid if applied to, for example, ordinal data of only a few values. While Kruskal & Wallis do give corrections for ties, which may arise in any continuous variable where $n>10^p$ where $p$ is the precision in number of significant digits, I suspect the test is unreliable for cases where all values are tied many times, as would be the case for Likert scale data with 5-ish or 7-ish values.
At the very least you may expect to find few illustrated examples published which violate an assumption of the test.
References
Kruskal, W. H., & Wallis, W. A. (1952). Use of ranks in one-criterion variance analysis. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 47(260), 583–621.
Mann, H. B., & Whitney, D. R. (1947). On A Test Of Whether One Of Two Random Variables Is Stochastically Larger Than The Other. Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 18, 50–60.