I think the key phrase that you missed was "that hot." I'll explain this specific scenario.

You stick a porcelain plate into the microwave on high for two and half minutes. That shit is hot. Pits of hell hot. Like, you grab it for half a second with your fingers and they turn red for a minute.

You're wearing a cotton undershirt in the middle of the night in the middle of summer because it's hot and you're not trying to impress anyone grabbing a midnight snack. You know what a cotton undershirt is? It's incredibly thin. You can practically see your hand through the fabric because it's so thin.

Now it's clear that one fold of the shirt won't do it, and two certainly doesn't do it either. You fold your shirt four times and you grip onto the plate for dear life because you sure as fuck don't want to drop it, but the only thing holding the plate is 10 fingers all on one edge of the plate because the shirt doesn't wrap around the plate nicely without getting all over the food.

Gripping hard for about 10 seconds, you realize that those four folds weren't enough. The heat has gone straight through the fabric and now your fingers are getting burned once again.

So you just keep folding until there's a a pretty decent buffer between your fingers and your hot as a motherfucker plate. Unfortunately, you seem to have run out shirt, and trying to carry your plate at a perfect 90 degree while standing upright and having the clothing buffer reach up to your chest causes a balancing problem.

So you start to bend over in an effort to make your fingers a flat surface for the plate to rest on while still using your undershirt as the world's shittiest oven mitt.

That make sense for ya?